To the iconic Muson Hall, Onikan last Thursday for the much heralded unveiling of Ayo Opadokun’s book, The Gun Hegemony. A big scary word, hegemony gives the uninitiated some jitters, just like the Yoruba word, egeremiti, which could well be a scare word which announces its intimidating intent by sheer onomatopoeic intensity. Hegemony is one of those useful Greek words which have found their way into the modern English language to elaborate on the concept of human domination by dominant or hegemonic groups that exert their dominion over others by sheer force and/or pleasant persuasion. Just because you are scared of the word doesn’t spare you the spell of its pervasive invasions.
This morning, the atmosphere was redolent of human distinction and respectability. They had all come to honour and pay their respect to a man who was a known face of popular resistance to military dictatorship and the struggle to rid Nigeria of despotic rule which high noon was the annulment of the freest and fairest presidential election in the history of the country and its disastrous aftermath. Captains of industry, moguls of the press, barons of solid capital, scions of old money, illustrious royalty, masters of political brinkmanship, emergent plutocrats, former governors, old ministers, top international diplomats, brave journalists of the old barricades, warriors of the protracted siege against the military/feudal complex, former freedom fighters now lapsed into sedate respectability and unreconstructed anti-military stalwarts who had come to hang their old tormentors.
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No one in the hall appeared more pleased by the distinguished crowd which included Femi Gbajabiamila, the Chief of Staff to the president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, than the man of the moment and author, Ayo Opadokun. He was effusive in his praise of his friends, comrades, associates, benefactors, rescuers, patrons and supporters including his beloved spouse. Opadokun himself is quite a bundle. But he is a bundle to cherish in your corner of the ring. Brave, fearless and indomitable when going forward, his political and institutional memory is a tad short of staggering. He knows where all the dead bodies are buried and it will be a truly feckless fellow who chooses to mess around with him. As a Chinese proverb has it, if you tarry long enough by the bank of the river, the bodies of your enemies will wash by. In the jungle of Nigeria’s postcolonial politics, the Offa-born warrior-prince is an arch-survivalist.
As speaker after speaker rose in fury to denounce military rule in all its infamy, its villainies and brutal decimation of the Nigerian dream this fine Thursday morning, you got a sense that they have come to bury Ceasar and not to praise him. Particularly outstanding was Chief Emeka Anyaoku who gave a clinical analysis of why a new federalist constitution was an urgent imperative for the nation. Standing proudly erect and impressively alert a few days short of his ninety third year on earth, the former international diplomat has spent the better part of twenty six years since his retirement canvassing for a wholesale reconfiguration of the unitary arrangement that is at the heart of Nigeria’s endemic instability and political predicament. From the fiery denunciations and the enraptured approval of the audience, it was clear that the noise was not about to disappear.
Here comes the sublime irony. Not all military interventions can be dismissed with a wave of the hand. In any case, hegemonies even of the gun cannot be sustained by force alone. They require intellectual rationalizations and philosophical fabrications to insinuate them into the popular consciousness. Soldiers alone do not construct the gun hegemony. They require intellectual ammunition and critical firepower from the political and intellectual class. We must be painfully honest with ourselves. There is no point hiding behind one finger. You cannot build something on nothing. Military intervention in Nigeria was probably inevitable; a disaster waiting to happen. So was the gun hegemony. Had there been some national consensus following the military mutiny of 1966, the rump of Balewa’s cabinet would have withstood the attempt of General Aguiyi-Ironsi and his cohorts to subvert the constitution. But the famous owl of Minerva always begins its flight after the event.
