IN a world out of joints, some nations are more disjointed than others. Everywhere you turn, humanity is in sharp retreat. By humanity we do not just mean the physical distinction that separates us from the lower apes and other genetic cousins. We mean our very “human-ness”, that is the set of values and institutions that has propelled the human species from the planet of apes to the plains of modern civilization.
There is a steady erosion of these values and a sharp regression back to the state of nature where everything is famously short, nasty and brutish. The absence of humane-ness, of compassion and of generosity of spirit means the absence of humanity. Sheer bestiality reigns supreme. There are acts of appalling cruelty and wanton disregard of the sanctity of human life which will make members of the animal kingdom wince in horror. The entire human landscape is foaming with blood.
It has been said that humankind is not a fallen angel but a rising ape. The ape no longer rises, but is stuck in a self-created cage. When institutions put in place by humankind fail, we are no better than our animal cousins. The de-civilizing of humanity did not begin one day or in one country and with one people for that matter. Reacting to the logic of globalization and very much the same existential pressures in different combinations, the human species is under threat everywhere from its own kind and kindred.
This past week, the United States of America and North Korea finally squared up to each other in what promises to be a nuclear Armageddon the like of which has not been seen since the Second World War. In a curious and intriguing historical irony, the two protagonists are not dissimilar in bullying temperament and eccentric disposition: one is a jowly scoundrel notorious for whimsical cruelties while the other is a permanently off-message sinister stuntman with a child-like compulsion for outrageous conduct.
This is what you get when a deadlocked democracy at the end of its tether is confronted by a deranged Stalinist autocracy and fetish cult of personality foisted on an industrious, authority fearing people. This is not a nuclear confrontation between a civilized and urbane John F Kennedy and a shrewd and rationally calculating Nikita Khrushchev such as the world witnessed fifty five years ago. It may well be that the fey and feckless Kim Jong-un will help the American political elite to concentrate their mind.
Meanwhile elsewhere in the world, it is as dark as it is dire. This past week in Nigeria in a novel dimension to premeditated brutality which may yet sound the death knell for organised worship in the country, a lone gun man sauntered into a church in Ozubulu in Anambra State. By the time he finished spraying, more than a dozen people lay dead while scores crawled about critically wounded and bleeding. It was perhaps the first time in the history of the country that the church suffered collateral damage in a drug-related feud.
A day after this development, the increasing ritualization of poverty and primitive fetish of money lust which has led to the discovery several horror-forests, monster-caves and other hair-raising catacombs of human cruelty erupted in a tunnel in suburban Lagos where the plaintive cries of a captive woman attracted the attention of passers-by and subsequently the security forces.
In the ensuing melee and social mayhem, two suspected kidnappers were lynched by the irate crowd while scores were wounded by security forces who opened fire as they were about to be overwhelmed by the swelling mob. A Divisional Police Officer had to be forcibly rescued from the mob and was lucky to have escaped with bruises. As this was being written, the discovery of another ritualist den in Lagos has led to a summary execution of two suspects.
In the north of the country, the Boko Haram insurgents, in an increasing show of strength and defiance, struck around the Lake Chad Basin. Several fishermen were slaughtered and their corpses neatly stockpiled in their canoes as if they were fish for sale. The Boko Haram insurrection has been going on for almost a decade and despite being technically denuded, its capacity for horrific brutalities remains undiminished.
Taken together with the wave of violent kidnappings, armed robberies, random killings, assassinations, cultic eliminations and other acts of horrific criminality, these samplers of primitive bloodletting from all parts of the nation tend to suggest that Nigeria is virtually submerged in an ocean of blood; a huge fireball of violence which does not leave any part exempt from the trajectory of thunder. The average citizen appears already inured to violence and daily degradation but it has never been this bad in the history of the nation. Increasingly, everybody is resorting to self-help and self-medication.
If the worst is truly yet to come, then we may all be dead in the long run. A little over thirty years ago, Dele Giwa noted that Nigerians have been shocked to a state of unshockability. In other words, nothing, not even the worst human catastrophe, can shock Nigerians any more. But it would appear that Dele Giwa spoke too soon. Shortly thereafter, the prose maestro himself was dispatched by a novel and spectacular method of public execution.
If he had been around in contemporary Nigeria, Dele Giwa, who would have turned seventy this July, would have witnessed the infinite capacity of human beings for elaborate suffering stretched to its elastic limit. The limit that we thought was the limit was not quite the limit. This week, taking a dim view of developments, the OPC, the Yoruba self-determination group, requested that Nigeria should be declared a war zone. Nobody can fault the premise on which the request was based.
It has been said that although humankind first civilised in Africa, but he has not continued to do so there. Africa is regarded as the lazy laggard of human civilization. Despite the open-ended hostilities in the Middle East and the horrific carnage in Syria, the Stone-Age barbarities of ISIL and the Taleban, it is in Africa that human-made adversities including spiritual sorcery combine with epidemics of dereliction such as AIDS, EBOLA, LASSA fever other pestilential afflictions to produce the worst example of human suffering and biblical miseries.
Africa is the last surviving hellhole of humanity. But it is in Nigeria where everything seems to come together, in a manner of speaking, and that is human disaster and natural calamity to produce a great tragedy in Technicolor. Given its size, scope and the range of talents available to the nation, it is in Nigeria where the last rites and rituals for Black Civilization will be staged or where the entire race will rise like a phoenix from the ashes of death and destruction. Africa will sink with Nigeria or be saved by it.
So far, the omens are not encouraging. While some parts of the world, particular the western sphere, are victims of their own success, others, like Africans, are victims of their continuing failure and inability to transform from passive objects of history to its sterling subjects. Those who can neither transform their societies or their countries are condemned to watch the slow-motion superannuation of their cultural values or the physical extinction of their societies.
Many have fingered the rampaging momentum of globalization as being responsible for much of the global unease and the fatal disruption of the normal and customary channels of conflict resolution and the seamless harmonization of societal values and norms. But you cannot eat your cake and have it. Taking moral and ethical umbrage at globalization is an exercise in futility and a profitless venture.
While it is true that the smashing together of different cultures and disparate values, the forcible incorporation of the old peripheries into the emergent centres have led to a global convulsion and a clash of civilization within, among and between nations, the obverse of the coin is equally interesting.
Since the dawn of civilization, the forcible co-option of incompatible cultures and social values, the concussions and collisions of norms and mores, the harsh transplantation of people and the virtual abolition of time and space have led to some of the most stunning scientific advances in human development and a radical restructuring of capitalist categories.
Yet it is profoundly ironic that despite its momentous contribution to the advancement of western civilization over other competing civilizations, popular resentments against the irruptions of globalization have led to xenophobia and the rise of right wing populism replete with ethnic baiting in the older type western nations such as Britain, France, Holland and even the US. Brexit, the Le Pen phenomenon and Donald Trump are direct manifestations despite heroic counter rallies.
In Nigeria and other colonial nations created as a consequence of the second wave of globalization and the internationalization of slavery, the collision and lumping together of incompatible nationalities and countervailing cultural values have led to social normlessness, state dysfunctionality and a national gridlock which can only be forcibly prised apart or unlocked by sophisticated political re-engineering.
Once again, it can be seen why it is the loosely federated and freely coordinated nations constructed with centrifugal tensions in mind that are able to withstand the ravages and negative consequences of globalization better unlike European countries with an iron unitary structure so stiff and rigid that they are not amenable to bending.
It is modern state architecture versus medieval steel scaffolding. This is why it is the loose baggy wonders of Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Belgium and India as well as the compact Scandinavian miracles, bar some hiccups and the odd tremor, that are exemplars of multiculturalism and peaceful multi-national cohabitation rather than older type master-nations and their colonial progenies.
As Nigeria roils in an epochal crisis of political, cultural, spiritual and economic values with the centre almost buckling under and the federating units engulfed in anomie and anarchy, it will take a miracle of political, social and psychological engineering to reclaim it and stem further loss of invaluable life. As the preceding catalogue of catastrophes suggests, that miracle will have to come sooner than later either through peaceful democratic reorganization of the nation, biological coup d’etat or consuming revolutionary anarchy leading to a radical revamp of state architecture and its personnel.
There is no point in quibbling any further. Given the astonishing wastage of human and natural resources, the sharp erosion of hope and faith in the nation, the veneer of modernity and civilization superimposed on primitive savagery, Nigeria has very poor prospects for surviving in one piece.
