Clarifications, modifications and amplifications
Perhaps the most important lifeline a serious columnist relies on is the feedback procedure . Without a commensurate feedback, the column is a self-sustaining monologue; a dialogue between the deaf and the dumb. Feedbacks ensure that columnists avail themselves of different or countervailing perspectives sometimes forcing a moderation or modification of views without surrendering to entrenched dogmas and jaded worldviews.
In the course of writing a column for different platforms continuously for forty years, including the underground Tempo magazine, and this particular incarnation in The Nation since January 2007, the columnist has interacted with various stakeholders either directly in face to face encounters or via e-mail and lately What’sAPP. Among them are blue-eyed royalists from the ancient north, Yoruba supremacists, Igbo nationalists, hegemonists of the minorities, middle belt flamethrowers and anti-establishment crusaders.
It has been a collision of altars on a colossal scale. A political, economic, intellectual and spiritual ferment is ongoing in Nigeria on a scale not witnessed since the run up to independence. The obverse of the coin is that there is often much heat without much light; much friction without much traction. It is only in Nigeria that a well-educated person can hold on to rigid and entrenched views more suitable to the age of medieval tyranny without batting an eyelid.
It is only in Nigeria that a well-travelled and cosmopolitan person can glorify and glamorize the travails of a normally forward-looking people trapped between the abyss of their compromised feudal antecedents and the throes of aborted modernity. It is only in this country that you find supremely endowed and accomplished individuals convulsed by hate-filled hysteria arising from ethnic overreach and unrelenting propaganda against other nationals as if they themselves are immaculate angels.
It must now be admitted that these crippling national contradictions, these idols of the tribe, make the notion of a critical mass or the possibility of elite consensus in Nigeria a forlorn romantic dream. In Nordic countries where the idea of consociational politics or elite consensus took root, the elites by virtue of racial and religious homogeneity are imbued with enough patriotic spirit which allows them to look beyond “pillarized” differences to arrive at a consensus about core values and the destiny of their various nations.
But in fractious, multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multicultural nations with different modes of production boxed together by the economic imperatives of colonialism, it is proving well-nigh impossible to achieve elite consensus on anything, particularly about the collective fate of a distressed country.
In the light of unfolding events in the country, the resurgence of abduction and kidnapping culminating in the gruesome assassination of three Yoruba obas and the shrill cries of marginalization and deliberate underdevelopment coming from significant northern stakeholders over the relocation of certain sections of the CBN, it is now important to modify what has become the hallowed mantra of this column about elite consensus.
This is what is known as reconciliation under duress. It is now obvious that in volatile and combustible multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural colonial nations, complete elite consensus is a virtual impossibility. What we should aim for is substantial elite compliance, a situation in which there is a substantial compliance among the majority of the elite factions about the destiny of the nation.
It is either this elite unification and moderation of countervailing notions of the nation is imposed from above by a reforming and modernizing elite group or we begin to think about the unthinkable. Given the dire emergency in which the nation has found itself with rampaging herdsmen on the match again, with insecurity plaguing everywhere and with the naira sabotaged to near extinction by the political class as well as enemy nationals bent on bringing the nation to heel, the unthinkable is the possibility of Nigeria becoming another Somali/Somaliland which has just ceded part of its territory to landlocked Ethiopia.
It doesn’t get messier and more nation-dissolving than that. This is not the time for ethnic sabre-rattling or the whipping up of tribal rage which may eventuate in a genocidal maelstrom. There has been too much bloodletting in this country over nothing except elite avarice and gluttonous greed. It will be recalled that in its earlier incarnation, the Boko Haram/herders’ marauders also killed off some emirs in the Gwoza corridor and defiled their thrones.
What is driving their rebellion is principally economic and not ethnic triumphalism or religious chauvinism. It is sheer economic destitution and class rage that led Boko Haram to active rebellion. The cankerworm has now spread to the rest of the country. The blame must be laid squarely at the door step of the northern feudal master-class which spawned them and which has failed to modernize unlike most other feudal formations on the continent and the world at large.
It could have been far worse had the mournful weariness and lifeless insipidity which seemed to have become the hallmark of the Buhari administration lasted for another six months, or if the Kangaroo presidential ticket its somnolent boss was trying to impose on the nation had prevailed. Nothing, however, in the Book of Auguries or in the annals of national propitiation of malignant gods could have prepared the nation for what is currently unfolding as the post-Buhari bouquet.
It is the peculiar burden of those who refuse to abide by the damning verdict that nothing beneficial can ever come out of a product of colonial malignancy. This is why this column will refrain from excoriating the distinguished Senator Ali Ndume. Ordinarily and despite his stern visage and fiery demeanor, Ali is a reasonable and well-comported gentleman of progressive antecedents who exudes the dictum that nobility must have its obligation.
The idols of the tribe and what is known as cultural habitat leavened by a sense of feudal entitlement must be very strong and overpowering indeed, otherwise why has Ali remained unfazed despite the revelation that his strident advocacy is motivated by the anticipated plight of his own children who work for the CBN rather than a concern for the welfare of workers from the region?
And this is coming from a highly placed principal officer of the ruling party and the president’s party? Nothing speaks more to the brittle nature of party politics in our contemporary polity and the ideological meltdown of party formation in the nation. As he manoeuvres his way through the banana peels and the dangerous landmines of the Nigerian polity, President Tinubu must be wary and worldly-wise. He must pitch for a bipartisan solution to our multifarious problems when and where it is imperative.
The current circumstances, fluid and flux as political allegiances are becoming, call for caution and considerable political cunning. During a heated debate in the Commons, the British Prime minister, Winston Spencer Churchill, was reprimanded by a young Conservative MP for revealing party secrets before the “enemy”, by which he meant members of the opposition parties who were lapping up everything the great man was saying and having the fun of their life.
Wearing a jocose frown, the great man retorted. “Oh no, my boy! That is not the enemy. That is Her Majesty’s loyal opposition”. Now redirecting the young MP’s gaze to the rear of the house where dyspeptic old Tory backbencher grumblers sat, Churchill growled. “Just look at your back and you will see the enemy. The enemy is behind you!”
The old Tory grandees never forgave Churchill for his dramatic ascendancy to the premiership in a time of dire emergency. The great wizard of Letters and political brinkmanship never forgot them, too. Given the apparent collapse of elite consensus, Nigeria is in a similar emergency. It will take a person of Churchillian courage and wisdom to navigate.
