An avid reader of this column after reading last week’s piece, particularly the famous debate on diarchy between Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first and last ceremonial president of Nigeria, and Alhaji Alade Odunewu, a leading Nigerian journalist of the preceding era, pointedly asked this columnist about Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s contribution to the debate. The answer is that the scholarly and rigorous Awo took no part in the debate, considering it not only a distraction but an exercise in futility and frivolity. As far as Awolowo was concerned, the military has no place in modern governance.
Accursed are the countries that fail to listen to their leading thinkers, philosophers and cerebral statesmen for they shall not continue to roam about in the wilderness of unviable existence. Awo seemed to have been proved right by subsequent events, despite the irruption of a slew of military despots in Latin America, particularly the reprobate and murderous General Augustino Pinochet who unleashed a reign of terror and mass liquidation on his own compatriots after masterminding the assassination of the lawfully elected president, Salvador Allende. Fifty years after, Chile is yet to recover from the polarizations and bitterness brought about by repressive military rule.
The dismissal of the Greek military junta which held hostage the very nation where modern democracy started, the struggle to put messianic military institutions in their place in Indonesia and Turkey, the subsequent botched coup in Russia after the unraveling of empire and the rallying of political society against military rule are part of the heroic folklore of modern history. These nationalistic armies based on their past heroic exertions at the behest of their people felt they had earned the right to perpetual rule against the tide of history. But they were profoundly mistaken, caught as they were in a time-warp.
The subsequent return of Nigeria to full civil rule by the end of the decade and analogous developments in many African countries pointed in the direction that events were moving. Exactly twenty years after the diarchy debate, General Babangida and his cohorts annulled the freest and fairest election in the history of the nation. Zik, in a moving epitaph to the diarchy debate, was known to have wondered aloud where the grundnorm for the annulment came from. That was exactly the point. Being a product of unconstitutional rule, the annulment was its own grundnorm. Military rule coupling and copulating with civilian reign is a genetic, ideological and constitutional disorder.
All this against the backdrop of certain developments at both the international and national levels, particularly the protests in Nigeria which turned violent in some states. But first the good news. It has been observed that a week is a long time in politics. Nothing has served as a certified proof of this maxim more than recent development in America. In less than a week, public mood in America has swung in a cyclothymic manner from dark depression to euphoric ecstasy and expectations. This had to do with the dramatic entry of the vice president, Kamala Harris, to the presidential race and her emergence as the nominee presumptive of the Democratic Party after the withdrawal of the incumbent President Joe Biden.
Barring any catastrophic development, Kamala Harris has all but sewn up the nomination of her party. This would have been unthinkable a few weeks back. Those who vow that America is exceptional in its capacity for endless self-invention and ability to withstand any looming political calamity seem to have a point. America is the ultimate shrine of self-belief. A combination of luck, a touch of divine guidance and a dash of American Exceptionalism have helped America pull through one of its worst crisis in recent times. It has saved the country from the clutches of a disturbed psycho and global anxiety. In some other countries, a doddering and tottering Joe Biden would have insisted on slouching on till the bitter end.
Kamala Harris is merely a symbol and a symptom combined. What has been bubbling under the surface for several decades in American politics has now forced its way to the surface, and that is the fact that America cannot continue as a refurbished slave plantation. In most of the elections held from the beginning of this century, particularly George Bush’s controversial triumph over Al Gore, the Democratic Party has always won the popular vote only for the plutocratic powerbrokers to pull their joker with the Supreme Court acting as the ultimate selectorate.
The election of Barack Obama in a moment of absentminded fair-mindedness provoked the horrific backlash that threw up the monstrous Donald Trump. Let it be recalled that the American Founding Fathers cannot be regarded as natural democrats. They plumped for Liberal Democracy out of hard and harsh necessity as the best way of organizing a modern and egalitarian society. Their self-evident truth about the inalienable rights of all humanity did not extend to sub-human species such as the native Americans, Black slaves and other people of colour.
To hedge their bet, they went for a patrician and authoritarian mono-gender senate as a countervailing necessity to the plebian and uproarious house of rabbles. To further load the dice against the rowdy plebs they came up with the idea of the Electoral College as the ultimate joker against rabid populism and popular vote, an attempt at electoral eugenics and backhanded sop and concession to the slave states and their superior habitants. Yet such are the ironies of history that an American deep state which rejected the brilliant, ferociously focused Hillary Clinton as its first woman president is now faced with the possibility a lady and a coloured one at that as its president and Commander –in- Chief. Interesting times are upon America.
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But while America has taken the first tentative steps towards self-redemption, Israel has been travelling in the opposite direction, a mine-littered route of martial self-apotheosis which represents an acute danger to extant global order and the whole paradigm of the post-Westphalia nation-state. It is rare in the history of the modern world for a single nation to constitute a direct physical threat to so many nations at once.
Not even America at the height of its martial glory and military dominance posed this kind of threat to the larger world. Unlike America which is a more complexly structured and variegated society, Israel, a one-tribe nation, is suddenly seized upon by a combination of messianic complex and persecution psychosis which is at once primitive as it is post-modern in all its psychoanalytical perplexities. No one has seen this type of nation-state species in the history of the modern world. The world is now confronted by what can only be described as the Israeli Question.
Ever since its creation in 1948, Israel has gobbled up territories not belonging to it and has made nonsense of the territorial integrity of the Arab nations surrounding it. Since the eruption of hostilities with Hamas on October 7th, Israeli has emerged as a new type of warrior-nation which does not seem to mind international outlawry and hostility as long as it achieves its stated aims and objectives. All its Arab neighbors have been reduced to cowering and trembling wretches. Not even a faraway mortal adversary like Iran has been spared the long arm of Israel’s vaporizing visitations.
After the mysterious death of its president in a remote corner of the nation and the Israeli-directed elimination of its top commander, Iran has become sombre and subdued unable to fathom out how to respond to the serial humiliation without losing it all. Arab countries which once relied on the military might of Iran to protect them are now discovering to their chagrin and discomfiture that Big Brother himself might need some protection from some bigger predators. It cannot come from Houthi insurgents. As we have once noted in this column, any country armed with nuclear weapons which is not afraid of unleashing it will be given a wide berth or the right of passage by other nations.
This past week, Israel demonstrated its dominance and emphatic superiority in the region by decapitating the political and military leadership of Hamas in one fell swoop in an operation which was as remarkable in its daring as it was in military precision. In a contemptuous breach of international norms, Israel invaded the most hallowed sanctuary of power the Iranians could boast of on their own soil in order to dispatch the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh. It was with the glee of a self-assured conqueror that Israel announced that another Hamas commander who disappeared a fortnight earlier should be added to the headcount. With the world, particularly America, no longer able to remonstrate with Israel, the Arab world would need a lot of fortitude and forbearance to deal with the most potent threat to their collective existence in modern times.
The world may be witnessing the final working out of the last phase of western hegemony in all its contradictory and countervailing momentum. Hegemonies are not constructed overnight and neither do they disappear overnight. Those who are hoping for a more gentle, peaceful and compassionate world would have to tarry awhile. The stateless anomie of Yemen, the horror and horrific landscape of Gaza and the frozen open morgues of Ukraine as well as the decimated and deserted desert of Sudan are just a sneak preview of what might follow.
With the United States hobbled by its own internal schisms and polarized political elite, with the UN reduced to a glorified hyperactive chat show despite the heroics of its helmsman and valiant staff, and with an Israel rampart and resurgent in triumphant militarism, the world is likely to be a very dangerous place in the short run. Here is what is likely to happen. With Ukraine slowly bleeding to death, Russia is likely to retain a huge chunk of Ukrainian territory it has seized. China will gobble up Taiwan when the west is at the lowest ebb of its confidence and assertiveness.
The Israel of the immediate future is the Israel we are witnessing: the unrivalled superpower and law-giver of the Middle East. Hemorrhaging on all fronts, the Islamic community will have to throw up new statesmen with the adroitness and pragmatic sagacity to negotiate the conundrum of powerlessness in a situation in which its traumatized citizenry demand more assertiveness. As a disaffected insider brutally puts it, Iranian authorities should not even contemplate retaliation with its outmoded and superannuated weaponry, otherwise several of its cities will be blitzed at once by the incorrigible Zionists.
So, where does that leave Nigeria and the other African behemoths? Consumed by internal contradictions, the civilized world is likely to look askance as Africa implodes economically, politically and spiritually, devoured by the epidemics of state dereliction. The old west cannot even attempt a second colonization because the momentum, the drive and the revolutionary self-delusion are no longer with it. While Nigeria is roiling in its second national shutdown in a spate of four years, Kenya has almost unraveled and both the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan are effectively defunct as states and as nations.
This is why a lot depends on what happens in Nigeria in the next few months. As the greatest conglomeration of Black souls anywhere in the world, Nigeria has been touted as the Mecca of the Black person and a magnetic hub for the injured and the dispossessed of the race. But before this can happen, Nigeria must get its act together. It may well be that the forces driving these protests and unabating national discontent are far more fundamental and foundational than hitherto imagined. Nations do rise from the ashes of defeat, just as new nations arise from the colossal debris of global disorder. Ask Israel and ask the modern Arab nations themselves.