The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • The Autumn of the Young Patriarch

    The Autumn of the Young Patriarch

    By this time next week, the Goodluck Jonathan presidency would have become history. And what a history this has been! As the whole country, in phenomenal darkness, wearily inches its way towards the excruciating finale, there is cause for sober reflection. Never in the history of this country have things been this terrible. We have finally arrived at the bottom of the terrible pit of hell. It is a sad commentary on the greatest conglomeration of Black souls anywhere in the world.

    There is good luck and there is good luck. As the good old Greeks would have put it, call no man lucky until he has carried his luck to his grave. Like a Shakespearean play, life is full of strange twists and even more remarkable turns.  The very combination of lucky circumstances that has propelled the formerly shoeless boy from Otueke to the pinnacle of electoral fortunes in his country has also made him the first sitting Nigerian ruler to be electorally dismissed. It doesn’t get more Delphic.

    But the Jonathan story is still unfolding. As the youngest patriarch among the paleontology of under-achieving paterfamilias, Jonathan may yet surprise us as a statesman where he has disappointed as a political practitioner. It may well be that Jonathan is more temperamentally suited to the elevated art of statesmanship than the dark science of political magic.

    Nevertheless, we must return an interim verdict on the Jonathan years, and it is as damning in its dismal details as it is as disagreeable and even disgraceful in its essence.  Never in the history of Nigeria has there been a more divisive and polarizing president. Never has such incompetence combined with cluelessness and such in your face impunity coupled with sheer vindictive malice. Jonathan leaves behind a country that is so badly distorted politically, economically and spiritually that it will amount to a wry understatement to conclude that the country is in the grip of a deep systemic rot. It is much worse.

    But however much we rail at him, however much we excoriate him in anger and deep disappointment, we are also railing at and excoriating ourselves. Jonathan is the ultimate product of a deeply disfigured polity and a luckless pawn at that. At any point in time, a ruler is the sum total of the strengths and weaknesses of the polity that throws him up and an accurate reflection of the forces at play and the balance of power. A system which allows a few privileged military officers to annul the electoral will of a whole country and which permits some demented autocrats to impose their political choice on the nation is bound to throw up a Jonathan as the end product of political infamy.

    So here we are at the very nadir of our political and economic fortunes. The good news is that hubris has finally met its match in a resurgence of national will and a reawakening of national consciousness. Perhaps we had to get to this gate of hell in order to come back to our senses.  Nothing concentrates the collective mind of a nation more than the thought of imminent extinction.  The very idea of God’s own people or God’s own nation is one of the pious and energizing myths of national creation. Nations are not products of divine proclamations but products of human will and self-surpassing exertions.

    By early 2012 and at the time of the petroleum subsidy hoax which has now returned in all its horrifying dimensions to see off Jonathan, it was clear to all discerning folks that Nigeria had a problem ruler on its laps. By that time, this column had a full measure of its man, describing Jonathan as a boy-emperor handed a toy rigged with explosives. It is perhaps owing to this nation’s legendary luck and the close attention of the international community that Jonathan was prevented from detonating himself and the nation along.

    Those who fought valiantly on the streets and in smoke-filled rooms of endless strategizing to rescue him and the nation from the clutches of an overreaching cabal became Jonathan’s sworn enemies. As he came under the spell and political sorcery of tribal hegemonists and clueless power neophytes, Jonathan began playing the ethnic and religious card in such a derisive and abysmal manner that the pan-Nigerian coalition on which he rode to power gave way completely, leaving him at the mercy of infantile thugs and some senile political delinquents.

    From then on, it was one constitutional infraction after another; one act of daring impunity after another;  one assault on the institutional integrity of the country’s judicial and legislative foundation after another. At a point, it seems as if Jonathan derives a sadistic pleasure in cocking a snook at the country’s old power establishment and the relish of the psychologically tormented in imposing disorder on fragile order.  Like a chap who killed his parents and asked the court to set him free on the grounds that he was an orphan, the chutzpah was quite breathtaking in its brazen audacity.

    Yet it was all clear where it was leading.  A rising power formation is one thing but a power bloc is another. Jonathan’s ethnic group might have been the ascendant power formation but it had not yet solidified and cohered into a durable power bloc. Power blocs are made of sterner stuff.

    In a multi-ethnic post-colonial nation with multiplicities of countervailing and mutually cancelling power centres, it takes intricate networking, durable bridge-building and exemplary wheeling and dealing to cobble together a dominant power bloc.  You cannot serially insult and humiliate a people publicly only to turn round when elections were approaching  with bales of dollar to bribe their renegade leaders.  Jonathan has been taught an elementary lesson in power politics.

    Even after allowances might have been made for defects of character and personality, it is only the remarkable structural disfigurement of the country that can explain how Jonathan became president in the first instance and why he became such a horrendous presidential disaster with such damning disclaimers even from the normally diplomatic international community.

    Standing logic and rationality on their head, Jonathan’s rabid partisans have been hollering that by conceding defeat at the time he did, he has snatched eternal victory from the jaws of bitter defeat. The question to ask is whether he had any real choice in the matter. The morphine of power addiction often wears off in the wake of imminent self-destruction. The eternal catch22 logic suggests that one’s concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers real and immediate is the process of a rational mind. Lucidity intervenes in the face of political morbidity.

    In the nearest future, we will know what really happened. As a means of easing off hapless and heedless African rulers who are about to detonate their country, the international community normally offers political sweeteners. In the heat of the battle for Monrovia, the illiterate and abject Samuel Doe was rumoured to have been promised a prestigious American fellowship. Valentine Strasser, a former disc jockey in Freetown who became head of state through the instrumentality of military brigandage, was given a scholarship to study in one of Britain’s leading universities.

    Strasser accepted while Doe demurred only to be brutally dispatched shortly thereafter. But at the last check, Strasser was living in a hovel outside Freetown with his mother.  Sierra Leoneans do not even want to be reminded of the period, not to talk remembering or honouring him as a former head of state.

    Statesmanship is not a title or honour to be bequeathed. It is earned. Exemplary leadership is not a function of an isolated instance of grace and common sense but the cumulative hulk of good and noble deeds accruing over a period.  Judging by the havoc and mayhem he has wreaked on the country in the last six years, it is clear that Jonathan is neither a statesman nor an exemplary leader.

    It is instructive that so soon after conceding defeat, Jonathan, like somebody recovering from a benign trance, simply reverted to his default mode of petty malice and vindictive witch hunting, deliberately loading the dice of destabilization against his successor and conqueror through questionable appointments and even more questionable confirmations while abandoning  real governance. If General Buhari were to respond in kind, then Nigerians must brace themselves for a stormy session of outlandish revelations ahead.

    But after all atonements have been made, let us be ready to forgive the man from Otuoke. A man cannot give what he doesn’t have. He has been plucked from nowhere by the power protocol and thrown into a brutal coliseum that he could barely comprehend. We must now return to the original labours of our founding fathers who were not just politicians but theorists of the state. Given the systemic rot, the promise of good governance emblematized by Mohammadu Buhari may just not be enough. Nigeria needs a new architecture of the state. Let that old debate which was terminated in 1962 now resume in earnest.

  • On the late Uche Chukwumerije

    In the post-colonial coliseum, one ethnic group’s hero is another ethnic group’s villain. Since the passing of the late Abia senator and fabled Biafran propagandist, snooper has received several calls and a few mischievous prodding to make his views known about the passing of the marximally bearded one. Up till this moment, columnist has declined citing rising tension of an ethnic nature. It is not the business of a responsible columnist to exacerbate or fan the embers of ethnic unease.

    But now that the mortal remains of the man known as “Sikiru Meje” among Lagos market women during the June 12 crisis has been committed to mother earth, we are in a position to divulge one or two things.  Snooper was an early but not a later fan of Uche Chukwumerije. There are certain indiscretions that can be understood and forgiven when placed in proper perspective but not completely forgotten.

    When words reached us in the US that Comrade Chukwumerije had become a senator of the Federal Republic, snooper had wondered aloud whether there would have been a senate to go if the market had shut down as he pronounced in the course of his virulent hate-filled campaign against the validation of the June 12 presidential mandate.

    The pity of it all was that Uche’s metamorphosis from sterling Stalinist to a mesmerizing messenger of military mendacity caught everyone by surprise, particularly some of us his ardent fans. As a youthful youth corper serving in his village in 1975, snooper remembered kneeling down before the mighty statue of Chukwumerije the elder at Mbala, Isuochi and thanking god for blessing the nation with such an illustrious clan. From the size of the compound and the statue, it was obvious that Uche was the scion of a prosperous lineage.

    By 1993, snooper has crossed swords with Chukwumerije in the heat of the annulment of the presidential election. As the on the ground columnist of the underground newspaper, Tempo, yours sincerely came down on the comrade, dismissing him as “a psychological hooligan” for imposing what was recently described by Olatunji Dare as a “psychosis of fear” on the entire country in a NAZI-like psych-op.

    In 1995, yours sincerely found himself in Mbala once again after a twenty year absence. This time it was attend the wedding of an old classmate and bosom friend, Patrick Ndukwe. His brilliant career cruelly terminated by early death, Ndukwe was easily one of the most accomplished scholars of Linguistics ever thrown up by this country. Although there was plenty of time and ample opportunity to do so, visiting the Chukwumerije homestead was the farthest thing on one’s mind. The pain and poison lingered.

    Yet it was a tribute to elite integration in this country that outside of his immediate family, the two close friends who attended Pat’s wedding were myself and the inevitable L.Y Shalangwa as at then the Deputy Postmaster General of the federation. These are the redemptive resources of elite consolidation and cohesion that we carelessly throw away in this country as a result of futile ethnic sabre-rattling and inordinate elite greed.

    There are extenuating circumstances for Chukwumerije’s conduct during the June 12 palaver. First was a belief prevalent among the Nigerian left at that point in time that the entire Babangida Transition programme and Abiola’s purported triumph was a classic instance of bourgeois chicanery with no bearing on the country’s real problems. It can be argued that the late comrade was only being true to some deeply held ideological conviction.

    The second was what was widely perceived as the post-civil war isolation, alienation and failure to rehabilitate and restore to national parity of the most significant sections of the Igbo intellectual class. Despite great strides, there are people who believe that the imbalance persists till date with the wounded and affronted roaming the wild in dark and paranoid fury.

    Whether this was enough justification for what Chukwumerije did remains to be seen, and whether his subsequent starring performance as a senator in the same “bourgeois” parliament he had tried to abort in vitro can atone for his earlier infraction is left to history to judge .Let the comrade now depart to meet his maker.

  • In search of African avatars

    In search of African avatars

    (Why the Third World is the lost world)

    With the dramatic ascendancy of General Mohammadu Buhari in the Nigerian presidential sweepstakes and the restoration of electoral normalcy in a larger chunk of the nation, it has become fashionable to dream again about the possibilities for Nigeria in particular and the lost continent of Africa as a whole.

    As this column keeps hinting, the omens about the Buhari administration itself are still not very clear. While some encouraging signals are coming from the retired general and former military autocrat, the incoming administration appears swamped and besieged by some deadwood and dinosaurs from the old order who are bent on stamping their accursed imprimatur on what should be a new beginning for Nigeria.

    From the old volatile west, there have been some rumblings. Some starry-eyed idealists in league with cynical revanchists of the defeated ancien regime are dropping the heavy hints that the dominant political group in the west has sold the Yoruba nation to the Hausa and Fulani feudal oligarchy. It is alleged that a frenzied and wholesale northernization of the power apparatus is proceeding apace while ambitious and perfidious lieutenants of the man known as the Lion of Bourdillon are sharpening their knives for an inevitable confrontation.

    Some of these political anxieties are worthy of analytical consideration. In and out of power, it is normal for any cohesive and organic power formation to bind and bond together. This resilience which comes from strong feudal ties and alliances and the superior capacity to organize itself and disorganize others as the occasion warrants is the secret and source of the strength of the old north. Once it identifies its interests, no other power formations in the nation comes close to the north in projecting and protecting its own.

    Be that as it may, it will be very foolish and strategically shortsighted in post-military Nigeria for any power formation however dominant to imagine that it can impose its will and political eccentricities on the rest of the nation. Nigeria can never return to that past. Those who believe that this is still possible after Abiola and Abacha as well as those who raise the bogey of renewed ethnic domination are merely incapable of dialectical reasoning in all its rigorously paradoxical possibilities.

    Rather than pointing at the inevitability of renewed ethnic domination, the political resurgence of General Buhari merely points at the ineluctability of a new beginning. Until things finally fell into place, the general had been at it for quite some time without any possibility of success even as his adversaries actually imagined that they had seen the last of the old warrior from Daura. While the block voting from the core north certainly helped, it was the explosion in national consciousness and the dramatic expansion of public space and the global means of communication and public enlightenment that set the pace.

    This is why this morning, this columnist solemnly appeals to the general not to allow himself to be captured by ethnic hawks and other tale bearers. The general should see himself as a product of a national upheaval, a pan-Nigerian coalition against evil governance and authoritarian misrule represented by the outgoing PDP government. If by any chance, Buhari is unable to fulfill his destiny as the man to lead Nigeria out of the wood, such is the current political ferment in the nation that many rival claimants would be thrown up by the crucible of contradictions.

    One of the key areas that must command General Buhari’s attention is indigenous knowledge production. Buhari will be the recipient of a thousand papers about how to reform and revamp our educational system but all this will come to naught if there is no fundamental capacity building attempt to indigenize our knowledge system. This is the key to all successful societies and nations from the western powers, China, Japan, India, the Asian Tigers and the advanced societies of the world.

    The largest chunk of the Third World is powerless and backward and will continue to be powerless and backward because it lacks the production of organic and indigenous knowledge to power its political, economic and technological development. Yet, the very notion of a huge chunk of Africa and some parts of Asia and Latin America as the Third World is steeped in remarkable ironies.

    Before it became a veritable and enduring marker of backwardness and underdevelopment, it was the radical and progressive leaders of these countries such as Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Surkarno who proposed the term at the Bandung conference as a way of distinguishing countries within their spheres of authority which pursued a middle road policy of mixed economy as against capitalist and socialist countries which belong to the first and second worlds respectively.

    Yet after the collapse of the Second World and actually existing socialist countries, one would have thought the term Third World would itself disappear, but it has clung to these countries like an ugly limpet. The fact is that if knowledge is power, the production of knowledge is the production of power. Those societies that cannot produce organic and authentic knowledge will only produce powerlessness and utter poverty. This is because poverty of knowledge cannot lead to knowledge of poverty.

    This poverty of knowledge is at the roots of Nigeria’s abysmal poverty and its continuous production of powerlessness in all its dimensions and ramifications despite outlandish oil riches. Unfortunately as the dismal career of our current economic witchdoctor, Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, attests to, and as the large scale looting of our national patrimony and the utter ruination of economy confirms, you cannot redeem poverty of knowledge or gain knowledge of poverty by importing clever examinees from Harvard and other western citadels and sanctuaries of knowledge and power production. They will simply chew the cuds.

    Unless they retool themselves or readapt their analytical skills, Harvard products must reproduce Harvard productions. These glorious citadels of western knowledge and learning and their productions are not meant for the easy consumption of non-western societies. They were not established to help Africa solve its spiritual, economic or political problems.

    Knowledge and power production is not a charity ball. Every society must lift itself up by the bootstraps. Establishing ascendancy in human society is not a tea party. In the brutal and unremitting battle of knowledge production and its concomitant production of power, human societies without organic capacity for indigenous knowledge production must fall by the way side.

    But you do not have to reinvent the wheel. The evolution of human society is marked and characterized by cross-fertilization of ideas with insights from one society or civilization acting as prodding insight for other human communions. Western knowledge production benefitted a lot from Arabic sciences which arguably took its impetus from Egyptian civilization.

    The infusion of philosophical ideals and injection of scientific knowledge which allowed the West to overcome the Dark Age came largely from intellectuals, scientists and philosophers fleeing the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. When a set of ideas is forcibly imposed on other societies such as we found in Western colonization, it is the equivalent of epistemological rape.

    Yet rape victims often survive to play first violin. It is only in Africa that they appear unwilling to do so. Let us look at the career of two of the Third World avatars who made momentous contributions to springing their respective societies from western knowledge-trap. Although a Cambridge graduate, the late Lee Kuan Yew related to western ideas with considerable aplomb. He was not averse to cocking a snook at western civilization or sneering at what he considered its dubieties. As far as he was concerned Singapore is not America or England.

    He once confessed to an interviewer that his greatest luck was that he was able to identify other colleagues who had the intellectual confidence and self-assurance to take apart any western concept or idea and then see how it can be adapted or discarded in accordance to the Singaporean reality.

    With that, he was able to boost the indigenous knowledge production which transformed Singapore from a Third World colonial backwater to gleaming and glittering First World in one generation. It may help to recall that Yew was of ethnic Chinese stock. The Chinese often view western arrogance with the sublime contempt of the bearers of an older human order.

    The other avatar is our own Obafemi Awolowo. Although a private student, Awolowo gained a degree in commerce in addition to his legal qualification. Yet through sheer mental discipline and extraordinary willpower, he was able to acquire a formidable knowledge of western society and institutions and by leveraging the insights gained, he acquired knowledge of a former colonial dominion which remains unmatched in its penetrating acuity and originality.

    When Awolowo applied the knowledge acquired to his Yoruba people, he was able to frog march them to the frontiers of western modernity within a momentous decade. In terms of knowledge production and political consciousness, this epochal boost has placed the western region of Nigeria at the cutting edge of political sophistication and intellectual awareness. Perhaps the best compliment the west could pay to Awo was when a British prime minister described him as belonging to the first rank of administrators anywhere in the world.

    Yet it needs to be stated that there is nothing preordained and inevitable about the ascendancy and triumph of western modernity over its other rivals. It was a function of random contingency, geography and the spectacular role sheer luck often plays in human and societal affair.

    By the end of the tenth century China was the leading empire-nation in the world with its ocean-going liners and their fabled mastheads described by spellbound observers as huge clouds unfurling in the skies going as far as the port of Mombasa in contemporary Kenya. Artifacts recovered in that ancient port suggested Chinese presence dating back to the seventh century.

    By the beginning of the twelfth century, Portugal had emerged as the first truly modern nation-state. But it was precisely at this point that the Chinese mandarinate became embroiled in a murderous power struggle with the feudal dynasty over the destiny of the nation which led to China being closed off to the outside world for centuries.

    By the time the veil was lifted, the world had moved on. In the case of the Portuguese, geography and location led the intrepid sailor, Vasco da Gama and his successors, towards Africa and India rather than towards Latin America and its vast riches and vaster colonial possibilities.

    Even then, the race to full western modernity was a ding-dong affair among western nations, with Portugal yielding ascendancy to Spain and with Holland economically trumping the Spaniards barely sixty years after gaining independence. England completed the military and economic rout of the early colonial powers only for England in turn to be militarily and economically shellacked by the emergent American superpower. In all these struggles for ascendancy, it is the nation with superior knowledge that always prevailed.

    If it is of any comfort, we might as well add things have not always been this bleak and dreary in Africa. When the Portuguese adventurers arrived in the old Kongo Kingdom around present day Angola, they met a society vastly superior in organization and cohesion to the one they left behind at home. They loitered around listlessly a bit, hoping to encounter the mighty army which underwrote this might empire.

    Alas, there was no army, only a loosely coordinated and rudimentary fighting force not much better than a hunting pack. The emperor had no clothes on. The Portuguese could not believe their luck. They then proceeded to sack the empire with clinical cruelty. In the next few decades almost all the surviving inhabitants were captured and transported as slaves to the new colony of Brazil through the new slave port of Luanda.

    The lesson to be learnt from all these encounters is that knowledge matters and human capital is the driving agency behind all societal advances. It will take at least three decades and three generations of unbroken progressive leadership to reverse the damage done to Nigeria and its capacity to produce its own organic human capital. We will be lucky if the damage is not more fundamental and irreversible.

    It may well be the time to resume the search for African avatars all over again. Pandit Nehru once ordered that if India could not clothe itself, the proud nationals of the new country should go naked. Within a few years, India had achieved self-sufficiency in the production of apparels. Nehru was tapping into the subliminal pride of the people of an ancient empire. They would have recalled that Indians used to joke about the poor quality of western fabrics when western adventurers finally made it to the Indian subcontinent five hundred years earlier.

    At this critical point, Nigeria and Africa need leaders who will mend the broken spirit and resuscitate the collapsed morale of the founding continent and original cradle of mankind. This is the crucial significance of what appears to be a new beginning in Nigeria.

  • Epilogue to a Nigerian nightmare

    Epilogue to a Nigerian nightmare

    History is a nightmare from which one is trying to wake up, James Joyce, the great Irish novelist, once memorably noted. As an insurance against the horrors of history, the old Dubliner wrote as if history does not really exist, indulging himself in grand mythic narratives and outlandish literary fireworks forged from the smithy of the harassed and harried soul. It seems to have worked for him, insulating the great literary genius from the terrible fiascoes of actual reality.

    As Nigerians begin to count the cost of sixteen solid years of authoritarian misrule by the PDP, there will be plenty of time for weeping and gnashing of teeth in the land, and for mass escape from bitter reality. It all reminds one of a great reggae song of the mid-seventies. “Weeping and wailing and mourning and gnashing of teeth, do you hear now?

    Nigeria has been taken to the cleaners by the PDP. Every institution in the land has been ravaged or completely destroyed. The judiciary is badly desecrated, and there are judges who should be in jail. The military has been destroyed by corruption and indiscipline. The police force has imploded with the proliferation of criminals in its rank and file.

    The Nigerian legislature, bar a few exemplars, is a haven of gluttonous crooks. Technocracy is a synonym for kleptocracy. The treasury is so badly burglarized that economic collapse is a dire possibility. Never in the history of civilized humankind have so few wasted the lives so many, and without any feeling of shame or remorse.

    And there shall come a time after the plague when humanity will begin to envy their animal cousins. Such times have come upon us. It is true that humankind first civilized on the plains of upper Africa, but they have not continued to do so there, particularly in Nigeria. Political, economic and spiritual cannibals roam about in Nigeria hunting down their hirsute brethrens.

    Hell is no longer an abstract concept. It is here with us in its throbbing and traumatic reality. On his deathbed when Justice Adewale Thompson was asked whether he would like to return as a Black person and a Nigerian, the great mystic and pan-Africanist savant retorted that he had had enough of both. A man cannot be a glutton for unremitting punishment.

    With the advent of a new political order, there is the possibility of a miraculous reprieve. But General Mohammadu Buhari has his work cut out for him. Very encouraging noise is coming from him, but the omens are still not very clear. Although there is revolutionary ferment in the air, what has brought the general to power the second time is not a revolution per se but a negotiation of power between two state parties aided and abetted by the vast majority of the Nigerian multitude.

    The general cannot seek revolutionary concessions from a non-revolutionary ascendancy. The attempt to impose a revolutionary reprisal against the AIT swiftly backfired and there will be more of such to temper and tamper with Buhari’s radically reforming zeal in the months ahead. To put it in legal parlance, relief not sought cannot be granted. The testy alliance will be sorely tested. It is precisely at this point that revolutionary expectations will come into a fatal collision with non-revolutionary momentum. The general will need all his political skills and street savvy to deal with a problematic situation.

    As Nigerians commence a difficult period of acute soul-searching and critical interrogation of what went wrong with their nation; as they mourn and bemoan their loss of political innocence, there will be plenty of political and economic analysis of what went wrong. But one thing that will be critically absent is the psychological and clinical analysis of the mental conditioning of the men and women who have put the nation through this orrery of horrors and historic torture wrack. The Nigerian political class deserves a psychiatric evaluation.

    This is why this morning, this column is turning attention to a great Nigerian who got to the juncture almost a quarter of a century ahead of his compatriots. It is the phenomenon of the healer as a seer. It is the obituary of the greatest psychiatrist ever thrown up by Nigeria and Africa. Please join us in celebrating once again the exemplary Thomas Adeoye Lambo.

  • Myths and Masks of Mental Illness

    With the death of Thomas Adeoye Lambo, Nigeria has lost another distinguished son, a paradigmatic titan and a colossus among the colossi of modern psychiatry. When beggars die, there are no comets seen, to recall the inevitable William Shakespeare. The sullied Nigerian firmament has since blazed forth at the passing of a true prince.

    In his life time, Lambo was a profound source of inspiration for many of his compatriots. In death, he has brought out the hidden literary gifts of his country folks in a rash of brilliant obituaries, particularly a memorable one penned by his protégé , Professor Akinkugbe, another Nigerian medical Maharaja.

    Yet the outpouring of grief at the passing of the great man has also come with a price. The sober reticence has denied us an opportunity to explore the implications of one of Lambo’s most brilliant but casually thrown insights: what to do with the political psychotics eternally thrown up by Nigeria’s dysfunctional political landscape, and the colourful masks they often wear to disguise their mental illness. Why do many depraved people who are obviously in need of psychiatric attention tend to prevail in Nigeria’s power sweepstakes?

    As a mental institution, Aro itself would be a very tame metaphor for the chaotic lunacies of contemporary Nigerian politics and the deranged antics of its principals. But that being the case, what does it say about the collective mental condition of a people who allow themselves to be lorded over by such disturbed characters? After all, the power-maniacs did not descend from Mars. This is perhaps why Lambo ought to have tarried awhile. But this is not Lambo’s turf.  Nigeria awaits its preeminent psychiatrist of political disorder who will combine Lambo’s technical brilliance with the redemptive political passion of a Franz Fanon.

    An illustrious son of illustrious parents, Lambo was not only a genius among men, he was also a human among geniuses. This last point needs to be stressed because genius is often accompanied by petty and anti-social impertinences. But as pointed out by his many admirers, Lambo was a genial and deeply humane fellow.

    Yet here was a man who with one insight of genius changed forever the course and trajectory of African psychiatry. As Professor Akinkugbe has brilliantly noted, this was not the usual feat of robotic remembering, the homestead of the proliferating professorial paper in which a single insight is split into a hundred monographs. Lambo did not need to resort to such academic trickeries. As Meredith Owen has aptly put it, genius does what it must and talent does what it can.

    This was truly the birth of a new science, of rural psychiatry.  According to Lambo, the ravages of mental illness among the rural poor can be mitigated and minimized if the agrarian bliss of their rural community can be reproduced in a psychiatric establishment rather than subject them to the harsh and institutionalized cruelties of the modern psychiatric ward.  Aro became a global trope for humane psychiatry, and the very idea that mental illness may well be a ruling class myth became a theoretical possibility.

    Such moments are very rare in the history of science, a true paradigm shift. With characteristic but vehement elegance, the French call it the moment of epistemological rupture,  that is when the chain of knowledge is broken and with all the violence that accompanies birth and the arrival in the world of a new baby. And since nobody had thought like that before, it meant that technically Lambo was on his own.

    This is what Louis Althusser, the great French Marxist philosopher, meant when he observed that all true geniuses are intellectual orphans. According to him, the price of genius ranges from alienation to madness and even premature death. Althusser should know. After killing his wife and long term collaborator in a moment of insanity, Althusser was promptly committed to a mental institution. He died there.

    A cultured rebel, Lambo was spared the fate of the quintessential genius. Since he threatened no one but his own folks back on a benighted continent, his international patrons could regard him as a benign curio from the heart of darkness. And since he was spared the worst neuroses of genius, it meant he could deliver the most outlandish of insights with deadpan humour and refined restraint.

    Nevertheless, his forage into university administration ended in a comprehensive fiasco. As the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ibadan, Lambo could not understand why students were demanding such privileges as exotic food and beer-drinking when majority of the people were wallowing in rural penury. In any case, who were the upstarts when he himself was the only son of the Iyalode of Egba Christians and a father who was one of the richest merchants of his era?

    It was a gross misreading of the psychology of the new post-colonial elite touching in its idyllic naivete and political innocence. The ensuing political eruption and the killing of a student, Kunle Adepeju, was to cost Lambo his post and some of his reputation. This was precisely the moment that Lambo himself moved permanently into this writer consciousness from hazy psychiatric hero to a humbled national figure.

    As a teenage journalist surveying the massive anti-Lambo demonstration from the verandah of the Nigerian Tribune, Adeoyo, Ibadan, one placard struck me with its malignant brilliance and poetic irony. It read: ARO IS THE BEST PLACE FOR LAMBO. Such was the inventive malice of Nigerian undergraduates of that generation.

    But Lambo was not to return to Aro, either as a patient, or the directing specialist. The former would have been a horrid fate. As Alexander Solshenitzyn, the great Russian writer, has observed in The Cancer Ward, there cannot be a worse fate than for a doctor to suffer an affliction in his own specialization. My next encounter with the phenomenon of Lambo was exactly a decade later in post graduate school at the University of Sheffield.

    The recently deceased and much admired Alec Jenner (1927-2014), a classmate of Lambo from medical school, had by then become the distinguished professor of psychiatry in the famous Sheffield medical school. Decades later, the professor was still so much in awe of Lambo’s feat at medical school that he thought all Nigerians must be geniuses. I benefited from this unduly generous branding, and so did a friend of mine.

    The professor cultivated us, and since Tokunbo Pearce was researching the phenomenon of madness in African literature for a doctoral thesis, we were both encouraged to participate in the professor’s community clinic in his sprawling pile in rural Yorkshire. Orgies of wine-drinking followed intense intellectual dissection of Marx, Sartre, Thomas Szasz, etc.

    One evening after the wine got into my head, I tried to engage a member of the community in an intellectual exchange, a foolishness that saw me retreating with a huge black eye. Professor Pearce, whose father was one of the first indigenous officers of the Nigerian Navy, knew the military virtues of advancing with caution.

    Perhaps Lambo would have cautioned me against intellectual hyperventilation. And we must now return to the great man. When Lambo famously cautioned that Nigeria’s prospective political leadership should be subject to rigorous psychiatric evaluation to determine their mental fitness,  the June 12 fiasco was still far away; so was Abacha; so were the infamous “elections” of 2003 and 2004.

    Every year, the absurdities in the theatre of political chaos lengthen. What will Lambo say?  It is obvious that long before he died, Lambo had given up on the political class of his beloved country. Like a grizzled Yoruba savant, he took the oath of eloquent silence.

    Yet since every Rome has its own barbarians, there was nothing extraordinary about Lambo’s insight. Every society produces its own pathologies as a direct correlation of its economic and political contradictions.  This, in combination with other variables, is what determines the type of political leadership thrown up at a particular epoch. The line between madness and genius is very thin indeed. Churchill was prone to severe and crippling depression, which he called the “black dog”.

    The same affliction dogged old Abe Lincoln. Napoleon was technically a madman. So were Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.  Lyndon Johnson was a bi-polar personality with cyclothymic mood swings. Richard Nixon was a paranoid psychotic. Ironically his successor, the sober and dour Henry Ford, ascribed his limited success in American politics to the fact that he was “disgustingly sane”.

    The interesting thing about these other societies is that they seem to have developed internal institutional mechanism for easing out political monstrosities before they cause permanent damage, or ,failing that,  for putting damage containment mechanics swiftly in place. For every Hitler, there was a Konrad Adenauer, and for every Stalin, there was a Nikita Khrushchev. When General Washington declined the invitation to become the democratic monarch of America, he was shrewd enough to recognize that there were already more lawyers in the US than soldiers and that he would be putting himself up for demystification.

    The problem with Nigeria and most African countries is that there is no such self-correcting system or institutional mechanism for dealing with a malfunctioning polity. Where there are, they are swiftly rubbished by a rampaging mob of disturbed politicians. After spending thirty years destroying every vibrant institution in the land, the military finally and logically self destructed. Now when it is needed as a patriotic countervailing institution, it is reduced to bleating incoherence and the periodic violence of the politically deranged.

    Rather than shoring up these crippled institutions or rebuilding them from scratch, the current political dispensation has chosen to despoil their remnants, particularly an already badly crippled judiciary. By the time it finishes, the political landscape will even be more awash with colourful and fanciful characters, political transvestites, Rasputins , electoral miracle workers, identity thieves, their doppelgangers and other outlandish figures  as if from outer space.

    But that also bespeaks the end of these times. Whether this is what we are currently witnessing, or we have to tarry awhile for an even more fanciful finale is a matter of conjecture. Surely, a political dispensation that destroys its own natural habitat and demolishes its vital sources of nourishment has written its own suicide note well in advance. It is a crazed serpent that has bitten its own tail. It is only a question of time before the poison heads for its vitals. Where a new Lambo with a dash of Franz Fanon would have been useful is in plotting the political pathologies behind the collective death wish of Nigeria’s postcolonial political elite.

    As a youth, Lambo was known to have worn a mask to his mother’s stall. “Mother, the dead salute you, but where is your son?” the masquerade rumbled. But the mother was not deceived, instantly recognizing her own. Now with the great masquerade departed, the dead and dying of Nigeria, from behind the mask of collective political disorientation, are asking: “Where is our country?” For our own we no longer own.

     

    (Minus some upgrade of historical data, this was first published in 2004 as an obituary tribute to Professor Lambo)

  • Regime change and its discontents

    Regime change and its discontents

    In African countries transiting from colonial rule to full political modernity, regime change involving a switch from ruling party to the opposition was until recent the exception rather than the rule. In many of these countries, transformation often takes place within the context of power changing hands between different factions of the same ruling party and between one generation of rulers and the other without the prospects of inter-party transition.

    In Nigeria’s fifty fear years of post-independence, this is the first time the nation will be witnessing an inter-party regime change. As Nigerians saw during the regime switch over from Umaru  Yar’Adua to Goodluck Jonathan, even regime change between different factions of the same political group can be quite a tense and stressful affair, sometimes taking the nation to the edge of disaster. In the case of an inter-party change over such as we are currently witnessing, things can become very turbulent and tumultuous indeed.

    Rather than this being viewed with sorrow, despair and a generous dose of Afro-pessimism, it should be viewed from the perspective of a longer span of history and of societies in a state of traumatic transition from traditional authoritarian modes to some form of political modernity. In this respect, African countries have done quite well.

    While there have been inter-party transition in several African countries, notably South Africa, Zambia,Senagal, Botswana, Malawi, Ghana, Benin Republic, in some other African countries, particularly in the West African sub-continent, military interventions have been swiftly terminated in favour of multi-party civil rule by a combination of local and international agencies. The recent experience of Mali, Guinea and Ivory Coast comes to mind.

    As the long period of power transfer finally enters its final four weeks in Nigeria, there have been some fearful hiccups and intrigue-soaked dramas playing out even as they cast a dark shadow over the smooth and seamless transfer of power from one state party to the other. After such a bitter, hate-suffused campaign and the subsequent ouster of a ruling party long accustomed to power, only a political innocentwould expect the ruling party to depart quietly and without some rancorous fuss.

    Not unexpectedly therefore, the mood of cheery optimism which accompanied President Jonathan’s graceful concession of defeat has given way to grim and often brutal political calculations and unseemly wrangling as the reality of  drastic recomposition of state personnel and the termination of tenancy gradually sinks in. Since this is the first time this momentous and epochal transfer of power is taking place in Nigeria’s history, nobody has a road map or a  compass to navigate the turbulent waters and the rude currents.

    Yet it is imperative for the political class to find within itself the inner strength and resolve to make sure that nothing untoward happens between now and the May 29th handover date.  Perhaps the lay over or interregnum itself is too long which makes power transfer very vulnerable to anti-democratic forces which abound in the Nigerian political society. In the nearest future, we may have to take another look at the constitution and our foolish fondness for American presidential rituals which sits oddly with the imperative of an authoritarian state and society yet to naturalize and domesticate the essence of western liberal democracy.

    In parliamentary-type democracies, the winner takes over immediately. Such is the haste that in Great Britain, which is the global exemplar of this type of liberal democracy, the victor often arrives at Ten Downing Street beaming triumphant smiles while the loser sneaks out through the backdoor. On May 2nd  1997 and hours after losing the general election, John Major was sighted at his favourite Oval Cricket grounds spotting dark goggles as he lapped at a pint of warm beer. Life resurrects after political death.

    In our own case, both the president elect and the president deposed are consigned to a whopping eight weeks in political limbo; a warehouse for political mischief and incalculable villainy. It doesn’t get more disruptive and destabilizing.  With Goodluck Jonathan rightly insisting that he is in charge till the very last second even as he is busy hiring and firing left, right and centre while General Mohammadu Buhari is also busy making ex-cathedra pronouncements about a presidency yet to mature, may God help us all.

    The deck is being loaded with the administrative, economic and human debris of the old order. General  Buhari may have to spend valuable weeks and even months clearing institutional impedimenta. We must find a creative hybrid between the American and British models which fits perfectly the reality of our situation and circumstances.

    It is important for us as Nigerians to get this vital transition right. Institutions are nothing but the herculean efforts of human beings which involve repeated gestures and rituals burnt into the human consciousness. They then become invaluable pathfinders acting with impersonal rigour and abstract impartiality.

    Even though this is the first time in the history of the country that we are having a power transfer from an ousted ruling party to the opposition, all those who wish Nigeria well above partisan politics, all those who believe in the manifest destiny of this gifted country as a potential haven for the Black soul must wish that it happens ever so often so as to teach political parties who abjure their covenant with the people a memorable and unforgettable lesson. This country will never be the same again.

    Except in the post-revolutionary momentum of a popular uprising, it is rare in Africa to find a ruling party that has held power for sixteen years being so comprehensively trounced at the polls by an opposition party that is barely two years old. What this means in political seismography is that the earthquake which brought the ruling party to grand ruination is merely dormant and may yet erupt again. Beyond the surface placidity, one can almost feel the frightening tremors.

    The ouster of the PDP is not the end of a process but the beginning of a working out of national contradictions   which may eventuate in the birth of a totally new Nigeria or the dramatic dissolution of its present iron format.  As a group, the Nigerian political elite have been too preoccupied with ephemeralities to see the latent manifestation beyond the surface pathologies.  This is more than mere electoral victory or loss of power. Something else is brewing somewhere. The contents and sum total of the country in all their roiling contradictions appear to have outstripped the current form and framework.

    As it is natural in the circumstances, the PDP is in a state of denial. When its obtuse diehards talk of reorganizing the party and repositioning it for power retrieval, just what do they mean? Do they really know what has hit them?  In order to even broach the possibility of survival the party must be completely reinvented and must come up with a totally new paradigm of service to the people. As it is at the moment, the party is a political brand soiled beyond soap and water.

    As a party, the PDP was meant for another epoch. That era has given way before our very eyes.  The PDP was conceived as a party of big men and pan-Nigerian powerbrokers who exercised a veto power over their subjects in what is supposed to be a modern nation-state. But when a nation in itself is driven by power hubris to become a nation for itself, the very notion of big man enters into a fatal contradiction with people’s power. All the remaining party big wigs have to do is to take a casual or casualty roll call of its big men that fell in the last election.  The political graveyard is filled with the bones of big men.

    As for the victorious APC, it seems that it also too preoccupied with new found spoils of office to do a reality check.  What brought the APC to power is not an endorsement of its platform but a rejection of the platform of the PDP. Anything but the PDP was the national battle cry. It all boils down to what we propose as the politics of negative memory.  In order to cultivate and gain the positive affection of the Nigerian electorate, the APC must put its strategic wits to work so as to come up with a far reaching charter with the Nigerian people and a comprehensive blueprint for transforming it into an organic and cohesive organ.

    If the APC is not to suffer the same fate as the PDP, it is in the interest of the party and the nation that has given it so much to demonstrate how and why it is different from the PDP. The current unseemly and unsightly scrambling and jostling for office and position do not portray it as a party different in quality and orientation from the PDP. The APC must remember the fate of the incongruous coalition which unseated the ancien regime in Kenya and brought Mwai Kibaki to power.

    Four years in power and as election loomed, the alliance disintegrated into its component parts and ethnic particularities. The result was a brief civil war from which Kenya is yet to recover. For starters, both parties must refrain from acts capable of jeopardizing the national date with destiny on May 29th or conduct themselves in a manner that can endanger the historic victory of the Nigerian people over authoritarian misrule.

  • The loveliness of the long distance trekker

    There is no killing the Nigerian spirit in its sheer indomitability. While officialdom is squabbling about the niceties and nuances of what is becoming the political equivalent of a hostile takeover, while a nasty dogfight about the details and dark spots of regime change appears to have commenced, Nigerians are not about to let go of the euphoria of seeing off a deadly political scourge. There is still magic in the moment. The national feel-good mood has received adrenalin shot in the arms. It has never felt better to be a Nigerian.

    Or fellow country people, how else can one explain the hype and hoopla, the whooshing  and swishing over  Suleiman Hasheem, the long distance trekker and latest hero to descend from the famished pantheon of national heroes?  If this is a stunt, it is a typically brilliant Nigerian stunt full of bravura  and a hint of chutzpah. By the time the Katsina indigene arrived in Abuja last week to swooning adulation and rousing public reception, he had seized the national imagination of a land looking for heroes.

    The outline of the heroic saga is as curious as it is compelling. In a fit of abrasive confidence, the itinerant construction worker had vowed to trek to Abuja were his hero, General Mohammadu Buhari, to win the presidential sweepstakes. The unexpected and unexpectable suddenly became extant reality. Without any further prompting, Suleiman decided to make good his promise. Taking a leave of absence from work, the hardy fellow who might have been foolhardy to the bargain, began his arduous slog towards Abuja from Lagos.

    It took him just under twenty days. Give or take, at seven hundred and seventy eight kilometers, that is like doing an average of thirty something kilometer per day. Snooper is wondering whether Suleiman employed the services of a crack Yoruba herbalist and the ancient potion known as kanako, or space constrictor,  a heady concoction which dulls sensory perceptions and induces a hallucinatory conquest of pains and physical exhaustion.

    On the way, according to Hasheem, he encountered the hospitality and generosity of total strangers who gave him shelter and encouragement; fought off wild beasts bent on making a meal of him and a gang of penitent armed robbers who gave him money upon discovering who he was. On the whole, he expended six pairs of canvas shoes. Words went ahead of him as he arrived at every historic milestone.

    In the event, it was an incongruously fresh-looking and ruddy-faced Suleiman who arrived in Abuja to wild public adulation and jubilation even as he swigged from a bottle of water. Everybody loves a hero who has conquered the threshold of pains. What a lovely way to enter the history books! On his own terms, Suleiman has entered the Nigerian Hall of Fame.

    There are curious gaps and enigmatic silences in this heroic saga, and it takes a generous suspension of disbelief. But what does it matter?  It is an ancient morality play, a delectable yarn brimming with heroic resolve and a typically Nigerian can do spirit; a labour of love and admiration which ought to serve as an inspirational motivation for generations to come. Unhappy may be the land that needs heroes but if Suleiman does not exist, we might as well invent one as a trope for the redemptive resources available to this country, warts and all.

  • Okon commences a walk to Daura

    As it is to be expected, the Hasheem example has spawned many imitators and overweening wannabes. The Red Cross is hereby placed on Red alert. Among the imitators is the fey and impossible Okon who barged into snooper’s room late on Friday with his trademark basket brimming with mischief and gamey humour.

    “Oga, I wan begin dem trek to dem  Daura make man give dem Buhari man dem fura de nunu and dem kulikuli. I go buy dem oranges when man reach Fiditi”, the mad boy announced.

    “I see, but what are the papers in the basket?” snooper asked with mirth and incredulity.

    “Na dem NNPC audit report. He get one Oyinbo man who come give Okon. He get names of all dem oil thieves and dem petrol ponsanponsan as Sikira him mama dey call am”, the crazy boy crowed.

    “I thought you were a Jonathan supporter”, snooper asked the boy.

    “Oga, I been dey support am before before but if him hand dey dis roforofo make dem Buhari flog am well well. Man pikin no be man pikin for dis one”, the crazy boy screamed.

    “But you took money from the transformation ambassadors?” snooper queried.

    “But dem transformer come burn”, the boy retorted.

    “Do you know General Buhari?”

    “Ha na my man for dem civil war. I come trek from Itigidi to Biakpan, to Ohafia , small time man reach Uturu Junction and Afikpo. Naim I come reach am for Abakaliki.” The boy sang.

    “You say you are thirty six and the civil war ended forty five years ago”, snooper chortled.

    “Ha oga, official age no be facial age. Obudu monkey dey sweat na hair dey hide am”, the mad fellow crowed.

    “Okon tell me your real mission to General Buhari”, snooper demanded.

    “Ha oga, I wan make him consider Okon for him kitchen cabinet. Abi no be dem people who dey cook for kitchen be kitchen cabinet?”, the boy asked with a sheepish mien. It was at this point that the mad boy was chased away.

  • The tragedy of the black person

    The tragedy of the black person

    These are not the best of times to be a Black person. They have never been. The phrase man’s inhumanity to man pales into utter insignificance when put side by side with the other proposition: Blackman’s inhumanity to the Blackman.  This is the crying shame of all Black people.

    Throughout recorded history and ancient mythologies, through the gradual differentiation of the human species into separate racial categories, the worst enemies of the Black race have been their own people. Either as colonial slaves or post-colonial serfs, either in outright captivity or coded confinement, Black people have been the worst tormentors of their own race.

    The Black race has been particularly stricken by a failure of leadership. The worst specimens of the race often end up as leaders. Among the half-mad, it is the comprehensively insane who are often the most self-assured. It is the iron law of human society.

    Among African leaders of the past half a century, there are at least four documented cases of certified cannibals: Marcos Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, Jean-Baptiste  Bokassa of Central African Republic, Samuel Doe of Liberia and Idi Amin Dada of Uganda who famously noted that human flesh is just a little bit saltier than normal venison. It is not enough to eat up their countries and their resources, they must also consume the flesh of the best and the brightest.

    This past week as horrid tales of xenophobic fury from South Africa gripped world attention, the global media were also beaming pictures of thousands of helpless and hapless Africans openly drowning from sinking flotillas in an attempt to reach salvation in mainland Europe. Many of them who fled Africa in search of greener pasture would never be seen again.

    It is a scathing indictment of post-colonial Africa and its laggard leadership. The unfolding tragedy of South Africa is a searing rebuke to the post-apartheid Black leadership and its failure to provide solace and succour to the South African multi-racial underclass after the millennial misery of White separatist and supremacist rule.

    Xenophobia naturally takes over when ordinary people find it difficult if not impossible to make ends meet or even to feed. As it so happens even in the most advanced nations, whenever utter scarcity prevails, immigrants are often the target of furious resentment boiling over to insensate violence. Hell is indeed the Other and the new order.

    It is now over twenty years since apartheid rule formally ended in South Africa. To be sure, it was not going to be easy. It takes time and arduous planning to overcome centuries of entrenched inequity and inequality. The poorly educated and psychologically repressed cannot become captains of industry and industriousness overnight.

    But it would seem that the ANC ranking leadership have been too obsessed with taking over the perks and perquisites of the former apartheid masters rather than working for the true emancipation of their people and the amelioration of the plight of a populace on the verge of despair and despondency. In the event, they have only succeeded in creating a new Black super elite while deepening inequality and socio-economic anomie in South Africa.

    Yet by the same token, the failure of the South African post- apartheid elite also beams unflattering light on Nigeria, the other potential African giant, and its failure to fulfill its manifest destiny as a welcoming Mecca of the Black race and a transforming economic hub for the continent. Had Nigeria become an economic success rather than a poster boy for thieving incompetence, it would definitely have relieved the pressure on South Africa. In default, Nigeria has become a nation of absconding refugees at the mercy of xenophobic South Africans.

    Luckily, it is morning yet on day of salvation. Nigerians have just gifted themselves a rare chance of a new beginning. In the light of the national mood of expectation, we publish this morning a piece which was written about a decade ago which directs attention to the plight of the Black race.

  • A long walk to freedom

    As the world settles into the new millennium, a radical shift in the balance of demographic composition appears to be under way.  A huge change in global population and the pattern of human settlement is taking place before our very eyes.

    As the phenomenon of globalisation abolishes time and space, as its momentum dissolves barriers, as its dynamic collars and corrals nations into involuntary cooperation, those left behind in the remaining hells on earth are also “globalising” with their feet. The result is human migration of awesome proportions which often rivals the best space adventure in terms of imaginative daring and resourcefulness.

    The world, particularly its better managed metropolitan centres, is under siege from this human armada. For the first time in its history, the Hispanic population in the United States is poised to outstrip the Black populace as the dominant minority. In Britain, unwanted guests show up at royal banquets. Primeval cousins long abandoned in ancestral homesteads suddenly pop up at dinner in the affluent west.

    A huge human tornado with origins in the distressed nations of sub-Saharan Africa is assaulting the European coastline. From Mexico and Cuba, and particularly from the human fiascos of Haiti and the Dominican Republics, it is a daily battle of wits and will with American coastguards; from Central Europe, the Western European gateway is often subjected to amphibious assaults combined with an infantry dash across the Channel tunnel as human initiative and sheer will power make nonsense of impregnable fortresses; from Asia, the boat people still take to the perilous seas.

    Accompanying the tragedy of this people are tales of extraordinary courage in the face of unimaginable adversity. These are epics of heroism stretching the limits of human endurance and the threshold of pains. They would make the fabled Moses wince in admiration. Almost without exception, the ordeal invariably ends in forced cannibalism as the logic of survival takes over from the imperative of civilising refinement.

    They tackle their grim fare with mournful restraint rather than the joyous relish of the truly famished. When rescued, survivors are usually in a state of delirium babbling insensate nonsense or staring at their rescuers in terminal disorientation. The desert and the high seas are not the most hospitable of places.

    Whatever it is that would make human beings subject themselves to this extreme torture and tribulation must be quite unsettling. Human migration, to be sure, is the first condition of humanity, and is the biological equivalent of shifting cultivation. No nation, tribe, race or people can boast with any assurance that their current location is the precise origin of their ancestors.

    Reeling before victorious armies, escaping from social hostilities, absconding from pandemic pestilence and other epochal disorders, or literally in search of greener pastures, mankind has always been on the move. Indeed, it is said that during the glacial age, certain precursors of the human race went back to water from whence they came rather than face the intense hostilities on land. Hence, the anomalous features of certain sea mammals, particularly the whale and the dolphin.

    But migration can also be an internal continental affair. The Yoruba wax eloquent about their origin in ancient Egypt which they left after a fierce battle of succession. The Fulani almost certainly left the Atlas mountains, incubating and mutating for several centuries in the Futa Jallon Plateau from where they eventually fanned across northern West Africa. The Itsekiri of the Niger Delta are almost certainly of Yoruba extraction. Sometimes, a triumphant army can engender dislocation and dispersal of epic proportions.

    This is what is behind what is known as the Mfekane phenomenon in South Africa when the victorious Zulu army scattered all the tribes to the wind. The one hundred year civil war which attended the collapse of the old Oyo Empire in the eighteenth century altered the demographic constitution of the Yoruba nation forever, engendering little local difficulties such as the Modakeke phenomenon, the Owu “ Diaspora” and other contemporary political imbroglios.

    Africa, as usual, occupies a unique position in this migratory conundrum. Something new always comes out of Africa. And we are not talking of bizarre exotica. There are three features unique to the benighted continent. First, there is no record of human migration back to Africa. The much storied captivity of the children of Israel in Egypt ended when Moses led his people back to freedom.

    The Jews have travelled long and hard ever since then, but certainly not back to Africa. Human beings may have erupted from the plains of East Africa, but it would seem that the natural human instincts lead away from the stifling heritage of the founding continent. When the heroic Colonel Netenyahu led his men on the famous Entebbe raid against the murderous thugs of Idi Amin, he was re-enacting an atavistic ritual.

    The second distinguishing characteristic for Africa is the absence of a civilising hub or nucleus to act as a magnet for the disconsolate and discontented of the continent with the exception of negligible and miniscule oases such as Botswana, Namibia and Senegal. North America has its United States and Canada; Europe has its affluent western nations and Asia has its Asian tigers.

    With Zimbabwe having joined the common ancestry of failed postcolonial states, with South Africa slowly unravelling as the revolution begins to consume its children and noble ideals, with the Nigerian mammoth taking its time to fulfil its manifest destiny as a multinational haven for the black person, Africans are left with no alternative than to flee Africa.

    The third characteristic is a function and a working out of the logic of the first two. It is true that Africa is not unique when it comes to hellish spots on earth where everything is short, nasty and brutish. The hell-hole of Haiti, the voodoo-ravaged disaster zone that is the Dominican Republic, the stone-age barbarity of the Taleban conquerors of Afghanistan, the trigger-crazed weirdoes of Chechnia, the morbid cruelties of the Balkan triangle of Kosovo-Macedonia-Serbia and of course the dark caves of Irian Jaya all compete for supremacy in the absolute misery index.

    But it needs restating that it is in Africa, particularly the vast human zoos of the sub-Sahara, that hunger, disease, want , famine of biblical proportions, epidemics of dereliction such as AIDS and the pestilential Ebola virus have combined with evil governance to produce a new paradigm of human affliction and destitution. Those who are looking for a vision of the apocalypse need not look very far. It is here on the continent that gave birth to humanity.

    Those who have not been devastated are voting with their sturdy limb. Their patience exhausted by the moral, spiritual, economic and political bankruptcy of the continent, they turn their back on family and friends forever. Let the dead bury the dead, they seem to be saying. But to reach civilisation, they must first confront the immense void of the Sahara, a monstrous wasteland stretching over three thousand miles teeming with ancient and recent bones.

    As the scalding sun singe their hair and the roasting sand burn their feet, they turn into hallucinating wrecks often before wild animals put finishing touches to them. This Old Testament suffering has now been memorably captured in a documentary titled, Exodus From Africa. It is a crying shame for humanity in general and Africans in particular.

    Those who subject themselves to this terrifying ordeal are by no means feckless or irrational. Indeed it may be one last act of stupendous will as they seek to rejoin remote cousins whose ancestors’ better honed survivalist instincts led them away from a sinking hulk. It is a leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

    To be devoured by wild animals in the Sahara desert may well be a better fate than to be eaten alive by the RUF savages of Sierra Leone. To die with hope in the Sahara inferno is probably a better deal than to expire under the heaving institutional debris of post-colonial Africa. Meanwhile as this goes on, as the flowers of Africa are daily scorched in the Saharan hell, African leaders are busy changing the name of their moribund and comically inept organisation, as if a name-change has ever kept receivers at bay.

    The question then is: Who will save Africa? Certainly not the hypocritical West and its institutions and instruments of domination. Too selfishly preoccupied with the gains of globalisation, Western nations have failed to note the debilitating effects of this phenomenon on fragile economies and still more fragile nations, delinked, decoupled and un-networked as a result of a different mode of production and the different logic of their mode of insertion within the structure of the modern nation-state.

    Without ever consolidating the gains of the nation-state, African nations are compelled to abolish embryonic national institutions and seek their fortunes in a solidarity of aberrant states. As it was with the internationalisation of slavery when Africa was occupied and its territorial mass forcibly organised along the image of the conqueror without any regard to internal dynamics, so it is with globalisation.

    Yet if one cannot argue with an earthquake, one can at least study its momentum and master its inner logic. Rather than being demonised and diabolised, globalisation ought to be rigorously encountered. This is the urgent task for the intellectual and political elite of Africa. Human development is not a charity ball, and western nations do not owe any obligation to any continent, beyond their own enlightened self-interest. To be at the periphery of any mode of production is not the disaster it seems.

    Western nations were able to overcome the contradictions of feudalism precisely because they were at its peripheral formation. This feat would have been impossible in the classically feudal economies of ancient Ethiopia, China and the old Tsarist Russian Empire.

    While consolidating their national institutions, African nations can creatively deploy the political devolution and economic deregulation of globalisation to overcome the contradictions and monstrosities of the authoritarian colonial state. If astutely handled, an unviable and unworkable monolithic behemoth like the current Nigerian nation can transform into a genuine multi-national state which can then serve as a transforming hub for other failed colonial contraptions.

    Either way, it is going to be a long walk to freedom. Where reforms fail and earthly authorities falter, people lose interest in the pursuit and possibility of worldly happiness, and those who remain will be driven to seek otherworldly succour and solace accordingly. This is not because religion is the opium of the people but a result of a basic human need for reassurance that life itself is not an expensive joke.

    In periods of political and social disorder and the total collapse of values, humanity seeks refuge in the transcendent morality which ennobles suffering and canonises pain. If this makes them vulnerable to religious charlatans, it also prepares the ground for the emergence of genuine redeemers, prophets and twelfth imams who will be at the head of rampaging social forces with absolutely nothing to lose. By then it will be too late for the undeserving elite of Africa and for many who would have taken one long last look at the crumbling cradle of mankind.

     

    (First published in 2003 )