In Nigeria, the list of the unthinkable grows shorter with every passing day.  The unthinkable happens with such regularity and frequency that we must now, as a lexical imperative, establish a gradation or hierarchy of such things.

On that scale, the merely unthinkable event would occur routinely.  The highly unthinkable would occur more sparingly.  The prohibitively unthinkable would occur more sparingly still, and the most unthinkable would be one for the ages.

Going by that metric, the most unthinkable happened last week at Nigeria’s premier military institution, the Nigeria Defence Academy, near Kaduna, in Kaduna State.

“The security architecture of the Nigerian Defence Academy was compromised early this morning by unknown gunmen,” said Major Bashir Muhammad Jajira, a spokesman for the institution.

“We lost two personnel and one was abducted.”

By “security architecture,” Jajira was referring to the Academy’s brick-and-mortar perimeter fence, topped with razor wire and doing so without fear, in the age of surveillance cameras and drones and satellites.  Some security!  Some architecture!

The language compounds the disaster – a disaster not just for the military but, more tellingly, for the nation.  It reveals a mindset that is not fully seized of the peril confronting the country from the combined assault of armed bandits, terrorists and fanatics, and of the fundamental imperatives of national security.

If the military cannot secure its own premier institution and personnel, how can it secure the nation against clear and present danger?

Days before the brazen assault, President Muhammadu Buhari appeared to have lost patience with the military in the war on the insurgents and warned that its high command might have to be re-organised again.  Previous efforts in that regard produced no significant results, he needs to be reminded.

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Then, in what came across as an unwitting admission that the military were not up to the task, the Chief of Defence Staff, General Lucky Irabor, said retired officers might be pressed into service to help.

As Boko Haram militants were knocking the counter-insurgency forces of the army around and about in encounter after encounter, it came to light that the national defence budget had been turned into a slush fund from which senior generals, political and media figures and all manner of careerists drew again and again to gratifying their private needs and fancies.

Back then, I asked one of the finest officers who ever donned a Nigerian military uniform whether he could still recognise in that structure the institution to which he proudly gave his best years.  The word that best expressed his feeling is the opposite of “pride.”

Funds for military equipment are probably no longer being squirreled away in faux septic tanks and in burial plots in cemeteries.  But the armed forces – not forgetting the police – are still notoriously under-equipped and poorly motivated.

The institution is broken.  It needs a radical overhaul.

Ahmed Joda (1930 – 2021)

Ahmed Joda earned and deserved the tributes that have poured forth since he died last week, aged 91.

He has been called a brilliant administrator, an accomplished technocrat, and a statesman.  He was all of these, and more:  He was a decent man.

The awesome power he wielded and the enormous influence he exercised in the public sphere for more than four decades never got into his head.  He was unobtrusive, yet engaging.  He was distinguished by his quiet efficiency, and by his capacity for friendship across Nigeria’s treacherous fault lines.   On account of this latter predisposition, he has been called “de-tribalised.”

He was Fulani to the core and proud of his heritage, as indeed he should have been.  By his bearing, his comportment and deportment, he would have belonged to the nobility and the aristocracy in any culture.

He was quintessentially cosmopolitan.

In how many Nigerian homes would you find the great sculptor and artist Ben Enwonwu, the filmmaker Ola Balogun, the noted columnist and editorial writer Sully Abu and the present writer as lunchtime guests?  That was the kind of company Joda kept at his modest Temple Avenue residence in Southwest Ikoyi, with his elegant wife, said to be a close relation of former Cameroun President Ahmadou Ahidjo, superintending with regal ease.

And how many eminent Nigerians would you find journeying to the Mbaise country, in Imo State, with a large retinue of friends and well-wishers, this writer among them, to take, in all humility, the title of Ebube dike?

I first met Joda in 1989, at one of Olusegun Obasanjo’s Farm House Dialogues, and was impressed by his succinct, informed and disarming interventions at critical stages of the weekend parley.  Weeks later, I met him again, in the Beninois capital Cotonou, at a conference convened by the Africa Leadership Forum for entrepreneurs — they called themselves “economic operators” – in that country.   The encounter was brief but warm.

Some three months later, sighting him on a Nigeria Airways flight from Lagos to Maiduguri, I walked down the aisle to pay my respects.  Where was I going?  Yola, I answered.    What was the occasion?  To present a paper at the National Conference of Auditors, courtesy of the Administrative Staff College of Nigeria. Was anyone meeting me at the airport?  No, I said.

Not to worry, came his reassuring reply.  His welcoming party would drop me off at the hotel where conference participants were billed to lodge.

On the tarmac, disembarking passengers milled with those who had come to welcome them as well as passengers who were about to board for Maiduguri, not forgetting the usual sprinkling of hustlers.        Among the former was Adamawa’s State Commissioner for Finance.  Joda introduced me to him as a journalist from Lagos on assignment to cover the Auditors’ conference.  Was the stage set?

From the commissioner’s puzzled look, I sensed that something was not quite right.  Going by protocol,          he would have had to be a major player in the event, possibly the designated chief host.  Now he seemed unaware of its status.

My disquiet deepened when we arrived at the hotel.  The place was eerily quiet.  Nothing suggested that a national conference or any conference for that matter was scheduled to commence there the next day.

The lone clerk at the front office said he had only just learned that the event had been cancelled or postponed, and that one would-be participant who arrived early had been marooned in the hotel for days.

“Come and be my guest, then,” Joda said, as he picked up my bag and led the way back to his car.  And for the next four days, I was his guest at his modest but tasteful bungalow in Yola.  And what a solicitous host he was!

The next day, he took me at the back of an open pick-up truck on a tour of his sprawling farm on the outskirts of the town where, falling back on his earlier training as an agronomist at the Moor Plantation, in Ibadan, he grew grains and other food crops.  There, the aristocrat in him also bred horses for his polo-playing son and for whomsoever might want to acquire then.

By the time we were done in the late afternoon, I was tired and longing to get back to the house and have a long siesta.  Not Joda, my senior by more than a decade.  He was as sprightly as he had been on our setting out. On dropping me off, he set out again on errands that were no less exacting, returning late in the evening.

That trip made us more than mere acquaintances.  Thereafter, I visited him now and then, and became a sounding board of sorts, especially on a possible presidential run at one stage of military president Ibrahim Babangida’s duplicitous political programme, goaded on like countless others by Babangida himself or his proxies.

Joda had neither the money nor the political constituency, nor yet the temperament. He once recalled with disgust how the consensus at one of the constitutional review conferences he participated in was that no political party or candidate could win a national election without rigging, and how nocturnal deliberations had centered on how to rig or outrig the opponent unto victory, not how best to serve the people.

If Joda ever seriously considered running for president, that experience must have dissuaded him.

To the end, he lived a life of service and commitment to the betterment of Nigeria.   It was an exemplary life, untainted by scandal.  May his legacy endure.

In journalistic folklore, no country was ever more remote than Afghanistan.

So remote, it was believed, that you could write or say anything about it without fear of being contradicted by anyone, for the simple reason that nobody in the attentive audience had the faintest idea of whatever was going on there or cared about it at all.

For all practical purposes, it might well be the farthest corner of the world. You could thus with little effort and even less imagination build a journalistic reputation as an authority of Afghanistan.  You ran virtually no risk of being found out.

Building on that iconic status, the famous political theorist V. O. Key coined the term “Afghanistanism” to denote the journalistic habit of writing candidly and stirringly about remote places.  If  Sonala Olumhense was not the Guardian columnist who injected that term into news reporting and commentary in Nigeria, he certainly is the one with whom its entry came to be most widely associated.

That was back in 1984, when newswriting and reporting in Nigerian took on almost every aspect of the clime described in George Orwell’s haunting, eponymous novel.  Reporting actuality became so fraught under General Muhammadu Buhari that writers and speakers had to devise new ways of telling the stories that needed to be told.

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Cartoons blossomed.

From a sound instinct for self-preservation, one editorial cartoonist came up with 43 seemingly innocuous terms for a certain receptacle, 43 units of which, not forgetting their well-connected owners, were implicated a controversial luggage transfer at the Murtala Muhammad International Airport.

Satire proliferated, and so did platform oratory as well as pamphleteering. Many a newspaper made a virtue of blandness.  Some learned to carry sanitized headlines and to bury the juicy stuff deep inside copy.  Some stopped publishing editorials altogether, or instinctively avoided running any story that could give the military authorities any cause to move against them.

Some wrote earnestly about tyranny and human-rights abuses in virtually every part of the world except Nigeria, but it was always clear that the subtext was Nigeria.  One newspaper spoke of a Third World “enveloped by a strong, anti-liberal spirit whereby, with few exceptions, reason is subjected to unreason and democracy to tyranny.” It cited Zia’s Pakistan, Pinochet’s Chile, Mobutu’s Zaire, Sudan’s Nimeiry and Marcos’s  Philippines as “pictures of oppressive dictatorship and subjugation of voices of dissent” and called for a “determined and relentless” struggle to oust such regimes.

The State Security Service was not amused.  A senior official wrote to the editor of The Guardian warning darkly that the authorities had taken note of the editorial.

Seminars become a growth industry.  “Every day, rain or shine,” Nigeria’s pre-eminent newspaper columnist Stanley Macebuh wrote: “There is almost certainly a seminar is going on somewhere.”  At such gatherings, he wrote, “all manner of subjects were discussed, unprintable views were sometimes expressed, and the seminar papers were fully publicised.”

The authorities soon got wise to such tactics and made the staging of seminars hazardous.   They warned universities and higher institutions to expect grave consequences if they leased their conference halls and meeting rooms to groups that might try to engage in subversive pontification.

By then, “Afghanistanism” itself had lost much of the conceptual clarity it once had.

The 1979 Soviet invasion and international television rendered the Afghanistan splendidly visible, even if not wholly accessible.  You could locate the country on the map and follow the changing fortunes of the doomed invaders and the derring-do of the Taliban, mere students who fought them to a standstill with nothing more lethal than their antiquated weapons and the Islamic fundamentalism that animated them.

Growing military assistance from the United States which saw the territory as a new theatre of a hot war and Taliban zealots as allies in the battle against godless communism locked Afghanistan into the front pages and headlines across the world.

Just as the average American family could on the television networks literally see its beloved son Johnnie killed in the jungles of Vietnam where America was waging a misbegotten war against native insurgents, the more privileged Russian family could watch Ivan done to death by the resistance and the Taliban in the forbidding deserts and mountains of Afghanistan.

That country became real in the hearts and minds of the attentive news audience, a place where world powers and their proxies fought real battles that resulted in real deaths on an industrial scale on real battlefields.  Unable to sustain the human and material cost of the invasion, Russia retreated in ignominy from Afghanistan, which then became ripe for the taking by an assortment of feudal lords, foreign powers and their local proxies, and the unyielding Taliban.   Or so the contending forces thought.

The result was a stalemate that secured for decades a place in the international news net for Afghanistan as a bastion of violence, narcotics, and fanaticism.

Until, that is, the November 9, 2011, attacks on the United States by Osama bin Ladin and his brethren in  the al Qaeda terrorist network who had, since the end of the Soviet occupation watched with growing disquiet as the United States established itself as an anti-Islam hegemon in the area.

Afghanistan became the frontline in America’s and the Western alliance’s War on Terror, with corrupt feudal lords as their allies and the Taliban, their former ally during the Soviet occupation, cast as agents of terror.

As that war raged, the United States and the Western alliance launched a massive invasion of Iraq, claiming falsely that its leader, Saddam Hussein, had masterminded the 9/11 attacks and that Saddam had stockpiled “weapons of mass destruction” with which he was planning to bring the world to ruin.

Osama bin Ladin and his followers who carried out the 9/11 attacks were not Iraqis but Saudis, and Saddam would not have tolerated them on Iraqi soil for a single day.  But why let the facts get in the way of the biggest project of imperial subjugation in recent memory?

They made relatively short work of Iraq but are still mired there a decade and thousands of American deaths and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties later – and counting.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the Taliban ran the clock on the Americans and their allies.  Emerging from the mountains and rural redoubts after the Americans and their allies had exhausted themselves in a brutal war that had alienated them from the people they said they had come to protect, and on which the American people had soured, they overran the country in a matter of months, with no credible resistance from the Afghan National Army and other elements that the occupation promoted as a bulwark against the Taliban.

In scenes evocative of Americans ragged retreat from Saigon at the end of its misadventure in Vietnam scrambled atop planes taxiing the runway at Kabul Airport or latching themselves to to the landing gear in a desperate bid to get out before the Taliban took full control.

It has been a nightmarish fortnight for America.

They may well now be wishing they had paid closer attention to the lessons of history, summed up succinctly by General Nguyen vo Giap, the tenacious commander of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong guerrillas who swept through the South and routed the American forces in 1975.

Asked by an American television reporter accompanying Bill Clinton on a visit to Vietnam, the first by a U.S. President since the end of hostilities; what had kept the Vietnamese going despite the fiercest and most sustained aerial pounding since World War II, a pounding that had stopped just short of the deployment of nuclear weapons, Giap smiled.

“It is not your country,” he said.

There is a limit to how many casualties you can put up with or continually abrorb just to sustain an occupation on foreign soil.  The United States crossed that limit in Vietnam in 1975, as the French had done before them in the same country two decades earlier.   Israel would learn that lesson in Lebanon.

America crossed that threshold again recently in Afghanistan.  And it is fast approaching that treacherous marker in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Afghanistanism is dead.  They will have to invent another term to replace it.

Nothing warms the heart of a member of Nigeria’s political class like the prospect of carving more states out of the 36 that now constitute the Federal Republic.

You could almost hear that organ pounding and racing in every politico’s chest the other day when a leaked report said the Senate Committee reviewing the Constitution has recommended the creation of 20 states and upgrading the Abuja Federal Capital Territory which had been functioning as if it were a state’ into the real thing.

Not every petition for a state was granted, to be sure.  And some states seem to have been insinuated into the project not because of any credible demand, but merely because some influential political figure wants a territory in which he can wield greater power than the present arrangement allows.

Some of the proposed states make sense.  A good many of them defy all logic.  Given the passion that governs debate and discussion on the creation of states, I do not intend to court mortal danger by identifying those that belong in the latter category.  Lessons from the Babangida era still cling in my memory.

Back then, military president Ibrahim Babangida re-drew the political map of Nigeria in accordance with his personal fancies to reward his friends and confederates, to punish adversaries, and to discomfit rivals real or perceived, and to cut them down to size.

Illustrative of the perversity that he usually brought to state creation is the case of a very senior military figure, a recurring decimal in Nigeria’s power calculus.  Babangida had assured him with that contrived earnestness of which he is a master that his locale of origin would be constituted into a state where he would be able, at long last, to call the shots, without having to reckon with the overbearing potentate who was forever lording it over the entire region

The senior military figure, usually a picture of reserve and calm self-possession, could hardly contain himself.  He shared the intelligence with all the persons of consequence in the territory that would be proclaimed a state in a matter of days, in a special presidential broadcast.  He relocated to his country home where he was to host the multitudes who had converged there to watch the historic proclamation live and thereafter celebrate their great fortune.

Their state was not among the three announced.

For weeks thereafter, fearful that the senior military figure might fall on his sword, friends and associates had to keep a tight, round-the-clock watch on him.  The state he had been promised later materialised, in spite Babangida and the potentate who had reportedly vetoed its creation at the time.  But today it is a haven for bandits and a hotbed of by factionalism.

Not that the senior military figure and others who campaigned for the creation of the state have any regrets anyway.  In this matter, the prevailing wisdom was, and remains: Just give us the state. We will deal with any problems as and when they arise.

The existing states may be functioning only marginally.  Most of them would have gone into liquidation if they were commercial entities.  Even if current resources grew substantially, the new states are unlikely to fare better.  Maybe that is why the jubilation in the locales of the proposed states is somewhat restrained, plus a stout official denial of the leaked report.

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It has also to be said that the promoters of the new states have been remiss in educating the public on the tantalizing opportunities that the creation of new states will unlock.

For a start, 20 new state governors will take office, from the Sahel to the creeks of the Atlantic shoreline, each with a deputy and a retinue of commissioners, special advisers, special and not-so-special assistants, chief press secretaries and security personnel, among a warren of other officials.

Twenty new first ladies will also come on board in the new states, along with their advisers, ladies-in-waiting, special assistants and other aides.

I will not be surprised if the new dispensation provides for the establishment of the office of the deputy first lady, to be occupied by the wife of the most senior commissioner as determined by His Excellency the Executive Governor or the State Executive Council.

Twenty new state assemblies will take their place beside the existing 36, and so will 20 new House Speakers, Majority and Minority leaders, House Clerks, and other functionaries and no fewer than 20 lawmakers, not forgetting personnel for each legislature’s secretariat.  The new lawmakers will hire a retinue of aides and draw the existing wardrobe, hardship, duty, constituency, entertainment, newspaper, and vacation allowances,

A career executive officer who has been grinding away at some terminal post in the civil service of Abia State will see his prospects of upward mobility brighten with the creation of Abatete State.  With the right connections and some luck, he could rise to head of service, or permanent secretary, director of administration and finance or other top-flight position, with a chauffeur-driven car, official quarters, and the statutory and under-the-table perks that often come with such stations.

What or who, pray, is to stop “charge-and bail” lawyers and supernumerary state counsel from envisioning themselves thrust out of their humdrum routines to the very top of the Bar and the Bench?  Each new state will of course have its own chief judge, plus a complement of officers of the judiciary. And its quota of Senior Advocates.

The long-suffering catechist at the local church can at last entertain the hope of being translated to  full vicar in the parish, now upgraded in accordance with the new reality.  The state will be constituted into a diocese, or perhaps two such entities, the smaller one presided over by a full bishop, and the larger one by an archbishop, with a long line of prelates in between.

A broadcast outfit has become a de rigueur emblem of statehood in Nigeria.  Nothing stops the resident disc jockey or continuity announcer in the local night club from aspiring to become director  of music programming or Head of Presentation in the new Labalaba State’s broadcasting corporation.    The Head of Programmes in today’s Otutu State will be a hot favourite for director-general in the broadcast corporation of tomorrow’s Atata State.

Like a broadcasting outfit, the university has become a glittering symbol of statehood in the Nigerian political system.

The new states will throw up 20 new vice chancellors and the same number of deputy vice chancellors, registrars, deputy registrars, bursars, librarians, plus the usual complement of deputies, senior deputies, principal assistant deputies, senior assistant deputies, ordinary assistants, and so on and so forth.   University lecturers in the existing system can become professors right away in the new universities without the harrowing experience of grinding out those tedious papers that only few ever read.

Each new state will of course get a hefty take-off grant, plus a guaranteed monthly handout from Abuja, in addition to a representative quota in every federal establishment.

I have saved the best for last.

Probably the biggest single problem facing the nation now is mass unemployment across the younger population. With the millions, nay tens of millions of jobs that will now open up, the creation of states might just be the final solution to that problem.

Who still says our National Assembly is self-absorbed and lacking in vision?