These are desperate times in Nigeria. The Boko Haram sect has abducted its way to international notoriety, focusing global klieg light on the nation and our national deficiencies. While the offer of international assistance in tracking the abducted girls must be applauded and appreciated, Nigerians must now appreciate that the initiative in confronting this local mutant of global terror has slipped from our hands. Before our eyes, Nigeria has become an international front in the latest confrontation between contending notions of human progress.
The implications for our military establishment and sacred national data are better imagined. But we need not worry or mourn. A feckless nation will always come to grievous harm. Two of the lessons we must learn as a building block for the future is the need for quality surveillance of our territorial space and the fact that intelligence gathering is a proactive business rather than a reactive affair. Given the repeated signals, Nigeria ought to have established a Federal Bureau of Counter-terrorist Intelligence a long time ago. It is this unit, rather than the police or the military, that should be the public face of the fight against terrorism.
Great nations thrive not just on the cutting edge sophistication of their technological eavesdropping but on the quality of their human intelligence. It was just a little over a decade ago that snooper met the Sultan of Savannah River in the house of a mutual friend in Savannah, Georgia. He was a former top official of the State Department, an Arabist to be specific.
But he seemed to have quarreled with his bosses and left in a huff. As a leisurely pastime which then became a full preoccupation, he had taken to sailing from New York in his specially kitted boat all the way down to Miami and then back to New York all year round. It was a weird form of self-exile and internal deportation.
It was on one of this to and fro, this nautical gallivanting, that our man chose to make a detour at the mouth of the Savannah River to visit an old friend , a fellow American and professorial colleague of yours sincerely. It was the same route that the youthful Brigadier James Oglethorpe had taken almost four hundred years earlier to found Savannah City and claim the whole of Georgia for King George and the Earl of Chatham.
He was dressed in a snow white jalabiya. Dignified and good looking, the retired diplomat was an African American, but he could “pass”, to use an American lingo. There was something about him which reminded one of a ranking Brahmin of the Sudanese Arab master class. After decades of mixing it up with the Arabs, he had almost become one. One can imagine him taking an early morning stroll on the streets of Khartoum and Omdurman looking very much like an Arab nobleman. It was discovered that he spoke Arab, Bedouin and Wolof fluently. It was America at the summit of its power and glory.
The conversation ranged from the Mahdi uprising in Sudan, the repressed homosexuality of General Charles Gordon, a.k.a Chinese Gordon, and General Kitchener’s savage reprisal for the murder of the British general. At this point, yours sincerely longed for his great friend, Professor Hakeem Olumide Danmole, the notable Islamic scholar at the Lagos State University and one of the experts Nigeria sorely needs at this point. Quiet, well-born and well-bred, H.O.D will never thrust himself forward.
It was as if the fellow knew what one was thinking about. He committed a verbal indiscretion.
“I am surprised that you know so much about Sudan”, the retired diplomat noted with patrician bravura and a patronizing mien.
“To tell you the truth, I am also surprised that you know so much about Africa”, snooper shot back to his fiendishly gregarious laughter and good-natured bonhomie. Snooper decided to change the topic by asking him about the sad events of September 11th, 2001. It was still very fresh then.
“Don’t worry, America will find Osama even if it takes a decade. He will be located at least a thousand miles from his adoptive country and summarily dispatched”, he answered with a calm shrug.
It was when the conversation turned to Ibn Khaldun, the great Arab historian and philosopher, who anticipated Marx and Spengler in many respects, that the retired diplomat completely turned the table on yours sincerely. Everything snooper knew about the great historian had been self-taught. It shows the limits and limitations of what Karl Marx, in a famous polemic against Bakunin, called the “erudition of the self-taught”. Snooper had been pronouncing the name with a heavy “K” not knowing that the “K” was supposed to be silent.
“Oh you mean Ibn (K)Haldun”, the American corrected and then went on a long elaboration of the great man’s theory of Asabiya and the ascetic discipline and group cohesion that come naturally to people in climates of unremitting harshness like the desert. This Russian roulette has played out in the desert for centuries but the theory is generally applicable to human society as a whole. Then the old boy dropped his terminal bombshell.
“It is the spirit of Asabiya and its ascetic discipline which allowed the semi-nomad Uthman Dan Fodio and his group to overcome and overpower the corrupt and indolent Habe ruling dynasty. But it is the law of nature that when nomadic people settle in the city and begin to taste its forbidden fruits, they lose the plot completely. Dan Fodio himself hinted at this. Unless your country takes great modernizing strides in the nearest future another group from the fringes of the desert will try to take out the old caste. If you factor in other contradictions, particularly a restive South, Sudan will be a child’s play.”
Goodbye Savannah and welcome Sambisa Forest.
