It is a universe out of sync indeed. Not since the height of the Cold War has the civilized world witnessed such an evil distemper abroad and a nasty disquiet at home. Something strange and inexplicable is beginning to happen to the post-Cold War order, hinting at a possible reconfiguration of the global order and international relations.
A year after the assassination of Kim Jong Nam, the exiled and estranged half-brother of Kim Jong11, the maximum ruler of North Korea, in a bizarre incident at the Kuala Lumpur Airport in Malaysia, an even more surreal drama played out in the quiet suburb of Salisbury in England this past weekend.
Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent and Yulia, his daughter, were discovered on a bench outside a restaurant in the somnolent rural paradise barely conscious after a sumptuous meal. In all likelihood, they had succumbed to an attack from a deadly nerve-agent called Novichok principally traceable to Russia.
It will be recalled that Skripal, a former colonel in the Russian spy system, was found to have compromised over three hundred Russian agents and was sentenced to thirteen years in jail. It is a measure of his importance to his new masters that he was exchanged in a spy-swap and taken to Britain to begin a new life. But the Russian bear may hibernate. It does not forget, and neither does it forgive for that matter.
Taken together, the two incidents, and in particular the Salisbury demarche, look like scenes out of a notable spy thriller, something like a James Bond film—From Russia with Novichok— or a horror political movie. Theresa May, the British Prime-minister, is hopping mad with the Russians. Britain had slammed a twenty-three diplomats’ expulsion on the Russian mission in London. Vladmir Putin has promised to reciprocate in kind, setting off a diplomatic spat which speaks to a new world disorder.
Whoever fells an elephant must be ready for a rumble in the jungle. The Russians have a beef with the west, particularly the US and Britain, for their role in the collapse of the old Soviet Empire. Without firing a shot, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan combined brilliantly to fracture the Soviet Union and the so called Second World of actually existing Socialist states.
In a saturation bombardment of enemy target, the western media began beaming images of paradisiacal existence in western societies to the increasingly restive Russian middle class who eventually came to the conclusion that there was no sense or point in sacrificing their comfort and prosperity to prop up some peripheral satellites states in the name of some bogus brotherhood of socialist humanity.
Once this right-wing re-engineering of the human psyche took hold of the popular imagination in Soviet Russia, it was only a question of time before the Russians wanted out of what they began to see as a misbegotten Socialist unitarism which has sentenced them to a life of misery and penury. With help from a naïve and deluded Mikhail Gorbachev, the Socialist Empire briskly dissolved into its component parts.
The direct result of this implosion has been a resurgence of Slavic nationalism on a scale that has not been witnessed since the virus of extreme nationalism led to the First World War. Putin is the direct heir and manipulator of this neo-Slavic ascendancy. It has led Russian into strategic duelling in Ukraine and the Black Sea as well as in Syria which has been reduced to a vast rubble of the dead and the dying. Russia has been fingered directly in the electoral shenanigan that brought Donald Trump in America and is now poised to destabilise a United Kingdom that is still struggling to find a way out of the Brexit conundrum.
If the Russians were truly involved in the rise of Donald Trump, it was a direct hit. The ascendancy of the rogue huckster has seen the rise of a native tribalism in America and governmental incompetence on a hair-raising scale that has dwarfed the most extreme manifestation of state delinquency since the advent of the nation-state.
The omens are very dire indeed and America is a-hollering with the commotion of hiring and firing which has not been seen since Thomas Jefferson and his iconic colleagues laid out a new template of governance. Only this past week, Trump fired Rex Tillerson, his Secretary of State, even before the plane bringing him from Africa has fully taxied to a halt.
As if on cue, Europe has played host to a resurgence of xenophobia and extreme native nationalism which have led to much national unease and dark foreboding in Germany, Austria, Holland, France, Britain, Belgium and Italy. In these civilized and advanced countries, the fear of immigrants and people of colour has become the cornerstone of nascent national wisdom. The world has never been more polarized and bitterly divided by race, colour and creed.
In China, they have just removed the restricting clause to pave the way for life rule for their wily president. Rather than rising prosperity leading to political liberalisation and the growth of democratic culture according to western truism, it has led to a tightening of the democratic noose and the rolling back of the political empowerment of the people.
So far, all is quiet on the Beijing front. There is no rumbling of a human earthquake on the scale of Tiananmen Square. In the event, the Chinese Emperor is once again retreating behind the forbidding walls of the Forbidden City. China is cocking a snook at liberal democracy telling anybody who cares to listen that it is peopled by a different race and that as an ancient civilization China is not expected to set much store by the values of recent civilizations no matter their condescending arrogance and pretentious self-righteousness.
When the inscrutable and unflappable Chinese behave in this manner, they are telling the world that the struggle for a new global order has entered a critical phase and they are not prepared to trade their natural advantages for kudos and subversive endorsement from the west. The heedless Russians did just that and are struggling with the nuclear fallout even as their new Czar is battling to impress it on the west that Russia is not a western country. The Chinese are chuckling with poker-faced delight.
Elsewhere in North Korea, the roly-poly fellow with the bouffant hair-do may not be as mad as they think. Believe it or not, he has already worsted the Americans in a nuclear face-off thus insinuating a timely equilibrium into a unipolar global order. He has already achieved the parity and deterrence of Mutually Assured Destruction. The world is already learning new lessons. The main one being that in the brave new world of nuclear offensive, it is not the size of a country that matters but its capacity to inflict maximum nuclear damage.
The Americans, through their overwhelming technological advantages, may yet figure out how to deal with the jowly terror of the Korean Peninsula and his threat to their uni-polar supremacy. Kim Jong 11 is like a fly perched on the most delicate part of the anatomy. But for now, it is obvious that the hardy North Koreans are not about to allow themselves to be dragooned to Washington.
What are the implications of these global concussions and unfolding world disorder so soon after the west thought they got it right with the end of the Cold War? The errant eccentricities of certain nations and historical individuals notwithstanding, they speak to the fact that there is a fundamental rationality embedded in human history which makes periodic restructuring inevitable for the global order and nation-states alike if they are to face new realities. Just as no nation can rule the world in perpetuity, no national ruling bloc can also hold sway forever.
At the turn of the nineties and with the Cold War sprinting to an impossible conclusion aided principally by the implosion of the Soviet Empire, Francis Fukuyama, an American scholar of Japanese extraction, wrote a famous book triumphantly proclaiming the unchallengeable dominion of liberal democracy and the irreversible ascendancy of America as the global law-giver. But with subsequent developments, it is now obvious that Fukuyama might have spoken too soon. What he saw was not the end of history but history at a particular ending.
Fukuyama could not have foreseen the advent of Donald Trump, the human fireball setting ablaze the most brilliant political institutions the modern world has seen, or the rise of primitive tribalism in America for that matter. Donald Trump is a nightmare for America and the rest of the world. It is possible that after four years, America will figure out what to do with this nasty glitch on their system. But the damage to American power and global prestige will be there for a long time.
If internal fissures can be mended, external afflictions are not so amenable. With the Iranians still chafing in ethno-theocratic distemper, with the Koreans threatening a nuclear holocaust, with China confronting the world with a new prototype of the Yellow Peril, with the rise of anti-Western Slavic nationalism in Russia, with Europe gripped by illiberal fear and xenophobia and with Syria reduced by carnage to a vast field of vultures, the combined population of societies under the hammer of anti-democratic hybrids far outweighs the dominion of liberal democracy.
What are the implications of these global ruptures for Africa? Unfortunately, the cradle of human civilization remains rooted in civilizational infancy. As it has been famously noted, although humankind first developed in Africa, it has not continued to do so there. This is a drama of giants and a poor man’s mouth is a cutlass fit only for bush-clearing.
African nations do not expect to be taken seriously as long as they remain a net exporter of misery and human afflictions to other nations; as long as the flowers of their youth are absconding and voting with their feet ; as long as its children are openly sold into slavery in the stateless anomie of Libya and as long as they are wantonly butchered by homicidal militias. A demented hen that sucks her best eggs cannot expect global approbation.
Unfortunately, African nations that could make the difference are weighed down by a combination of internal and external factors arising from their historical circumstances. The progressive nations of Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania and Botswana lack the world-scale economy and strategic population that could propel them into continental and global reckoning.
Ever since its liberation from the claws of a monstrous racist regimen, South Africa has projected a curious combination of international coyness and lack of self-assertion. The psychological impairment of the past still haunts and hurts. The ascendancy of Cyril Ramaphosa, a former iconic revolutionary turned sedate billionaire businessman, is unlikely to threaten the extant status quo. In retrospect, the wily ANC old guard who passed him over for promotion and sure presidential ascendancy knew just why they had to do that. They were not about to commit class suicide.
Ironically, Nigeria, despite its current difficulties, remains in the eyes of dispassionate observers the best hope for continental renaissance. Nigeria has the best national advantages in terms of sheer biodiversity, natural riches, human resources and quality population to drive a continental revival. But Nigeria is so hobbled by internal problems that it is a miracle it has continued to survive.
Stone Age leadership, ethnic fundamentalism, regional divisions, religious polarities, ancestral feuding leading to bloodshed on an industrial scale and state larceny have prevented till date the rise of an alternative elite formation that will drag the country by the scruff of the neck to the portals of modernity and modernization.
A new internally driven Berlin Conference is in order for Africa. African nations must set in motion the mechanism for the convoking of a pan-African congregation to deliberate on the fate of the continent. Without this, the unfolding global disordering of the old order is likely to consume most of its nations.
