• Okon reiterates his demand for security vote

By Tatalo Alamu

Whereas inequality, or gross disparities in economic income and political outcome, is a marker of backwardness, it is the aggregate of equality enjoyed by all members of a nation which determines how civilized and advanced such a nation is. In the march to greater equality, all human societies began from the ground zero level where brute force prevailed over right.

But while some societies progress, others falter and fall by the wayside while a few never took off, abandoned to a life of wanton savagery by history and civilization. As far as the markers of equality are concerned, it is the Scandinavian countries, followed by Northern Europe, New Zeeland, Finland and North America which show the way forward for humanity.

In the most sophisticated of these societies, humankind has tempered the worst excesses of human nature. Gender disparity and political inequality are virtually non-existent and life is marked by a politeness and pleasantness which make them feel like Elysian oases in a global desert of human strife and rancour. Equality boosts human productivity by removing all barriers to self-actualization while liberating genius and creativity.

To be sure, these societies did not get to where they are by judicial docility or parliamentary equivocations. Often, human progress is enacted against their temperate antics and complicity.  Equality is invariably the product of what a transformative American scholar in a 2017 book described as the “Four great Levellers of History”. These are: 1 Mass –mobilization warfare. 2 Transformative Revolutions 3.  State Collapse. 4 Catastrophic plagues.

Walter Scheidel wrote just before the Covid-19 pandemic which has now disrupted and distorted this century. But what is most frightening is the fact that all the four conditions, either in their embryonic formation or fully dressed garbs, are now present in contemporary Nigeria. We must bear this in my mind as the nation stumbles inexorably towards a horrendous rendezvous with fate.

On Wednesday this past week, members of the group known as Revolution Now returned to the streets—and the trenches—to remind us of unfinished business. They were met with full force by the police who forcibly disbanded them in Lagos while laying a pre-emptive siege to them in the capital city of Abuja. About the same time, the federal authorities raised the penalty for Hate Speech from half a million naira to five million naira.

This goes to show that much as we have tried to rein it in, the phenomenon of Hate Speech remains very much with us. About the same time all this was happening National Security Adviser, retired Major General Babagana Monguno, appeared on television to inform the nation of the resolve of the Federal Authorities to “rejig” the entire security apparatus of the nation. Note that the NSA deliberately avoided the use of the much-ballyhooed phrase “security architecture”.

About a fortnight earlier, the entire security machinery of the government went into overdrive gear warning soldiers about the dire consequences of mutiny and rebellion against constituted authority. This was in response to a call by the chairman of a minor party for the Rawlings treatment to solve Nigeria’s intractable political problems. This is what the Ghanaians call “the Junior Jesus solution”.

All of this reflects the level of frustration and desperation in the land at this moment and the grave nature of national conflicts that seem to defy all conventional solutions. With a resurgent Boko Haram openly and boldly returning to the sites and scenes of earlier crimes against humanity, with banditry, marauding, kidnapping and abducting prevalent in most places and with intra-ethnic conflicts in Southern Kaduna and the Middle Belt assuming a genocidal dimension, the situation is dire indeed.

Very few nations in modern history have survived this explosive cocktail of conflicts. In the interim and in addition to confounding poverty, Nigeria has now become a global poster boy for a dysfunctional society with many nations urging their nationals to give it a wide berth.

Social cannibalism, or the total disregard for the sanctity of human life, is rife. It is a miracle that the stressed and badly stretchered Nigerian Armed Forces have not been overwhelmed by adversity or fractured into ethnic and religious particularities.

But this miracle cannot last for much longer if the season of anomie persists. Since all normal political palliatives appear to have failed to make a dent on the crisis, it is time to begin to think out of the box.  A problem that is inconceivable demands solutions that are inconceivable, according to a famous German philosopher.

While efforts must be made to retrain and retool the military in the evolving paradigm of counter-insurgency operations and asymmetrical warfare, it must be stressed that it is in the total overhaul of Nigeria’s social and political paradigms that the battle will be won or lost. As it is at the moment, the Nigerian political project is threatened by massive disequilibrium.

It is a crisis of inequality in all its economic, social and political dimensions. A deeply ingrained inequality permeates all aspects and facets of Nigerian contemporary life. There is inequality in wealth distribution which strangely enough has little to do with actual wealth production.

There is inequality of ethnic and demographic configuration, inequality of social opportunity, inequality between gender and inequality of leadership recruitment. There is inequality spawned by the contradictions of caste and class. Finally there is inequality of democratic aspirations among Nigeria’s constituting nationalities.

These inequalities fuel national insecurities and the widespread discontent and disaffection which constantly threaten the very foundation of the nation. The situation has not been helped by what appears to be the virtual homogenization of the Nigerian political class and post-military party formation. In such circumstances, it makes it very difficult to hope for a resolution of the national crisis at the altar of democratic negotiation.

This political dystopia breeds bloodletting on such a Homeric scale that it makes the country look like a primitive site of mass sacrifice. Not even the hominid ancestors of humankind kill off themselves with such sadistic and psychopathic relish. The truth is that any society so structured against social and political fairness will know neither peace nor prosperity.

Societies transiting from varying modes of feudal production to some form of modernity are marked by grievous forms of inequality.  To most of their habitants, this structured inequality must appear natural and divinely ordained. Any attempt to disrupt the stable arrangement will look like an anarchic irruption which must be resisted with all the force they can muster or some modernizing insolence which must never be contemplated.

Where such societies are now boxed together under the rubric of a single nation with many other nationalities yearning for greater equality, it is a veritable bedlam of permanent chaos and anarchic bloodletting such as we are currently witnessing in Nigeria. Unless there is a superior force or a master law-giver that forcibly homogenizes the local differences or one that resolves the contradictions in favour of loose cohabitation, anarchy must prevail.

The pre-colonial gains of some of these societies and the strength of their traditional institutions have been wiped out under the template of the modern nation-state. As we have noted in this column once, some of these people were already feeling and intuiting their way to some form of modernity and modernization before succumbing to a historic set back. But there is no need crying over spilled milk.

By forcibly bringing the conclave of a thousand ethnicities together under the umbrella of a nation-state at par with developments elsewhere, the British colonizers might have been serving as a potent force for good. But owing to pettiness and animosity, they fudged the assignment by rigging the power calculus of the emergent nation in favour of the group least amenable to the rigours and rationality of the nation-state paradigm.

The result is a war of all against all such as we are witnessing, with various power groups attempting to capture central power in a bid to mould the new nation in their own image or bend it to their will according to the dictates of their political culture. In the unequal struggle for the soul of the nation, it is the most militarily dominant and most politically cohesive group that invariably comes out top but with a lot of anti-developmental baggage.

But the rise of counter-hegemonic production of knowledge, the advent of separatist agitation, the change in the demographic in favour of volatile youth, the growing national rebellion against stultifying incompetence and the crystallization of a major armed critique within its own region, are threatening this hegemony. Much as it has tried to hang on to power through raw cunning and murderous deception it is now besieged and confronted by opposition from all imaginable angles.

This is why twenty one years after the departure of the military, Nigeria currently resembles an anarchic jungle with the political elite neither able to consolidate on the gains of civil rule nor sufficiently motivated to move beyond the charade and chicanery of empty electoralism in order to face squarely the real problems confronting the country.

The rowdy stirrings we are witnessing on our streets, the murders in our forests, the carnage in Southern Zaria and the Middle Belt, the resurgence of Boko Haram, the arrant bestiality and wanton cruelty that have engulfed the nation in recent times bear witness to this spreading anarchy and its toxic pathologies. America has now sounded the warning that Al Qaeda has already insinuated itself into the conflict and is fully embedded. The vulture never misses the smell.

It promises to be a major collision of altars the likes of which has never been seen on the continent of Africa. If Nigeria is to survive in its present format, it will need to be completely rethought, reimagined and re-envisioned.  Anything short of this will merely accelerate the inexorable descent into a bottomless pit.

Old solutions and grandstanding rhetoric which promise a lot and deliver nothing in the long run will no longer do. What is required to head off the apocalyptic nightmare is visionary leadership and far-sighted statesmanship. Unfortunately, that appears to be in very short supply at the moment.

 

 

Okon reiterates his demand for security vote

A day after the latest outing of the amorphous group known as Revolution Now was thwarted by heavy-handed police presence, yours sincerely sat in his study meditating about the plight of good old revolution in the hands of revolutionary apprentices and novices of state implosion.

It was a far cry from the storming of the Bastille by an irate French mob or the scaling of the Winter Palace by a hardy Russian proletariat primed to punitive exertion against a decaying feudal behemoth. But it was a good reminder of unfinished business and how vulnerable to sustained assault the Nigerian post-colonial state has become. Something must give eventually, and we live in interesting times.

Thinking about all this, one recalled an event from the French Fifth Republic and General Charles de Gaulle its prime instigator and law-giver. After one of the numerous attempts on his life was foiled, the great French leader was promptly ferried away in a blaze of gunfire.

But the car taking him to safety suddenly suffered a tyre deflation which made De Gaulle a sitting duck had his assailants been more diligent in pursuit. Upon being dragged out of the car, De Gaulle wryly noted that those who were trying to save his life were as incompetent as those who were trying to kill him.

It was at this point that Okon barged in without any prior invitation. As the Covid-19 scourge appeared to be miraculously receding, Okon was in an upbeat mood. Life was gradually returning to normal or what is now known as the new normal. The markets are thriving again and Okon is back to his sharp ways and pickpocketing bravura.

This morning as if immensely aware of the latest controversy in the country’s political circuits, Okon waded in with his ribald jokes.

“Oga, good morning. He don reach time for power shift oo”, the mad boy announced looking stern and unsmiling.

“Which power shift?”snooper growled at the mad boy in good humour.

“Oga, I say make I come tell you say dem don bring back NEPA and I dey go switch them generator  from up to down. Abi no be dem power shift dem magomago mala dey complain about? “ the mad boy sniggered.

“Stupid boy!!” yours sincerely hissed at the crazy fellow. But before you could say Jack Robinson, Okon was back to mount a full offensive after switching off the generator.

“Oga, he be like say faint wan catch me and I never thief anything today”, the mad boy groaned clutching his stomach in a mock fainting fit.

“Meaning what? Okon, you better be serious or I will bundle you to the Covid centre”, snooper threatened as Okon quickly came to his senses.

“Ha oga no be like dat, no be like dat at all. He get one Niger Delta elder like dat who come faint as him driver take am pass National Assembly. But as he come reach Covid hospital, he come quickly wake. Dem Covid people no dey waste time for burial”, the mad boy crowed with sadistic relish, sending his boss on a swooning fit of laughter.

“But oga I wan tell you again dat I no fit go market again unless I get security vote. I no wan quench for Yorubaland. “ Okon lamented with a wistful look.

“Okon, just tell me why you think you deserve security vote”, yours sincerely responded, trying to humour the loony fellow.

“Ha oga, he get one, two, three, four ogbologbo group like dat I must to settle. Otherwise monkey go go market and him no fit return”, Okon moaned.

“Name them one by one “, snooper demanded.

“Number one na dem Awawa Boys. Dem get tollgate for outside market. Dem go detain and beat you if you no drop something. He get one Yoruba trader like dat who wan do Shakara for dem. Dem beat am sotey he come shit all over him  body. Kai oga I still dey smell ewedu for him Yoruba shit”, the mad boy snorted holding his breath in disgust.

“Number two”, yours sincerely called out.

“Ha number two na Sergeant Pepper. Dat one na real hot pepper. Na one craze Yoruba soldier and him head don knock patapata. Him de live inside container for market. Him say he don fight for Burma and snake bite come reach him head. Him dey beat people anyhow and if him ask for money and you no give am him go shout: abi you wan commit Kirikiri? Kai I no fit again.”

“Number three”, snooper shouted trying to suppress his mirth.

“Na Market Force. Market Force na one giant Ibo woman with white beard. I no fit look am for face. Na him dey determine market price. Him beat one mala with him turari and mala come faint. One day like dat I see am and he come ask me, abi na me you dey vibrate your lizard chest for? I come pick race, oga”, the crazy boy chanted.

“Number four”

“Number four na Mama Igosun…na..” Before Okon could finish the sentence, the old Amazon leapt into the room from God knows where. As she made to grab the boy, Okon ducked and scurried away.