The owl is a great bird of the night and its mysteries. But it could also presage a new dawn. In any case, in many local mythologies, the sighting of this strange bird is regarded as a development with serious portents which cannot be lightly dismissed or casually missed. A bogey bird of great presence and personality, the passage of the owl is an event of considerable general anxiety and communal alertness.
Hegel, the great German philosopher, famously noted that the owl of Minerva usually began its flight after the event, “spreading its wings with the approach of dusk”. In other words, we can only glean insight into a particular historical development after the event. It is perhaps useful to note that Minerva is the Roman word for Athena, the Greek deity of wisdom and philosophy.
As far as state actors and men and women of action and exertion are concerned, this is a no-brainer. Indeed, there are philosophers of praxis who are not willing to be caught by Hegel’s pre-emptive wisdom and off side tactics. In a brilliant riposte to Hegel, Karl Marx noted that even though philosophers have always interpreted the world, the point is to change it.
Change may finally be on the way for Nigeria in a way that no human can foresee or foretell. For any nation, a terminus is not the end of the road but the beginning of another journey into uncharted territory. When the history of Nigeria’s journey to the decentralization of power and development is finally written, this past week may well be seen as a momentous terminus.
It was the week General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida joined the maximum velocity train of restructuring hitching his mast and mascot to the lead wagon. In a widely circulated statement bearing his personal signature for the sake of history and posterity, Nigeria’s most influential military ruler and grandmaster of political and military intrigues called for a wholesale restructuring of the nation’s debilitating unitary federalism and a refashioning of its power principles.
Of course, it can be legitimately objected by power neophytes that IBB is just another Nigerian no matter how distinguished by past derring-do and how well inserted in the current power consortium. The emerging national consensus is that Nigeria has reached a point where the old arrangement and state organogram can no longer be sustained even by coercive force.
Nigeria must either be restructured or it will be destructured into extinction by violent antagonistic forces now laying a siege to the jugular of the nation. It has become the real do or die situation. Babangida is merely exhibiting the calm rationality and pragmatic wisdom of a man who has a lot to lose in the event that Nigeria unravels.
So, why the hoopla and the hullabaloo about a mere declaration by a man who is widely regarded as a principal culprit in the sorry plight of the nation? Or have Nigerians out of injury delirium and sheer emotional fatigue succumbed to what is known as the Stockholm syndrome, a situation of reconciliation under the duress with the tormentor?
But when all negative allowances have been made, the fact remains that General Babangida is no ordinary Nigerian. In a power game, no forces of change ever manufacture their own playing cards. You play with the card you are dealt which is often a function of the interplay of the subsisting balance of forces and emergent realities.
A man who has been present at all the momentous changes the country has witnessed in the past fifty one years as an active participant cannot be regarded as an ordinary Nigerian. But even more importantly in IBB we have the most classic manifestation of what this column has described as the Ottoman presidency in Nigeria at its most sophisticated and power-packed ferocity.
In a modern nation-state, as this column has noted, the Ottoman presidency is a magnificent anachronism, an arch and archaic formulation combining the harsh, statist and unitarist centralization of the Ottoman feudal empire with univocal concentration of power at the centre, brimming with Byzantine intrigues and political sorcery.
A man of calm deliberation and chilling single-mindedness despite the gap-toothed affability and warm, courteous and unfailingly polite manners, it was not by mere coincidence or symbolic pretence that Babangida chose the title of military president. Insider sources had it that Babangida had sent an advance team to Latin America to understudy the phenomenon of el Caudillo on the continent and the institutionalization of privatized rule.
By a remarkable historical irony, Babangida would eventually succumb to a different Latin American phenomenon, what is known as autogolpe or a self-coup in which a man organizes a coup against himself. If it goes awry, it leads to an own goal. When the full story of the stepping aside drama is finally told, it will be seen as a classic autogolpe. Several days after he was forced to retreat to his Minna fortress, the general was still issuing service postings which were swiftly countermanded by the duo of General Sani Abacha and Oladipo Diya.
So, if such a man who perfected the Ottoman presidency in Nigeria is now singing the nunc dimittis of the old order, who are we not to applaud? But not yet. The Minna maestro is a man of multiple entendre. The statement is vintage IBB, incredibly well-written recalling the days of presidential penmanship and bristling with literary and political gamesmanship. There was indeed a time when Nigeria had presidential speech writers.
But the snag is that Babangida may be stalking a bigger game. Famously nicknamed Maradona for his swift political dribbling, Babangida is not your run of the mill political strategist or garden variety military tactician. Those who take Babangida’s word at their face value do so at their own political peril. Restructuring is not a tea party.
In the history of the country, no political party, except the Balewa administration of the First Republic, has been able to effect any restructuring of the country. So, while Babangida’s genuine conversion may sound like sweet and soothing music to a particular segment of the political class, it could also be a subtle reading of the riot act to the select group of real power brokers who will make restructuring a reality to get ready for dire emergency.
Consequently, this is not the time for gloating or self-congratulations. In any multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation with people at diverse levels of contrasting civilizations, the development of political consciousness is bound to be uneven if not mutually contradictory. These are political pluralities in diversity to be creatively managed rather than summarily suppressed.
In the event that we conclude that it is better to prise apart the national gridlock in a confederal arrangement that allows each section to have its peculiar mode of political, economic and spiritual production develop into full maturity and their attendant contradictions, we must find the group civility and ethnic tolerance which allow this to take place in a cordial manner rather than in anarchic and fratricidal bloodletting.
If we may recall, the only time any meaningful restructuring ever took place in the country, that is the regional federalism of the First Republic, it was facilitated by the epic constitutional conferences of the fifties in which our founding fathers, despite their political differences, demonstrated a spirit of give and take which allowed them to fashion out the best mode of constitutional arrangement for the country. But for their exemplary patriotism, Nigeria would have expired in vitro.
Fifty one years of being forced to live together in the military and feudal garrison of unitary federalism beginning with the first coup have worsened ethnic relations in the country and exacerbated the National Question. In the circumstance, our leaders and revered elders must learn to manage ancestral memory in a bitterly divided polity and avoid the relentless and unremitting memorialization of real and perceived injustice.
Even in normal societies and organic nations, those at the frontiers of consciousness usually pay a heavy and severe penalty. This is the punishment for thinking the unthinkable and for being ahead of your society. It ranges from exclusion, imprisonment, restriction to mental institution and outright martyrdom.
It has been seventy two years since Obafemi Awolowo first noted that Nigeria was not a nation in the real sense of the word. For his pains and precocious insight, he suffered political exclusion, persecution, imprisonment only to be declared the best president Nigeria never had when he was safely out of contention.
And there have been other martyrs too: Abiola who was denied his presidential mandate by unitarist fiat, Enahoro who was never allowed to deploy his immense political gifts for the benefit of his country, Ken Saro Wiwa who was murdered for demanding manumission for his people, countless legal avatars, notable intellectuals, civil society activists, military rebels and refuseniks, diplomats, professionals etc.
The protracted battle for the best political arrangement for the country has taken quite a prohibitive toll, arising from pogroms, a civil war, a major religious insurgency, ethnic insurrections, coups and abortive coups and a general climate of fear and mutual loathing. No nation can survive on this horrific menu forever.
Going forward, we must now find the generosity of spirit to forgive and let the nation move towards its manifest destiny. To start with, our various leaders and revered elders must avoid the current grandstanding and permanent photo-ops which give the impression that some sections of the country are at war or are ganging up against other sections preparatory to hostilities. Apart from posthumous political self-rehabilitation, the public sabre-rattling contributes little to the resolution of the national crisis.
Second, acolytes of the 2014 Jonathan Conference must not insist on forcing the resolution of the conference on the government and the rest of the country. This is very poor political strategy and an unwitting attempt to reinforce the political gridlock. Whatever its landmark decisions, there is nothing unique about this conference as there have been other conferences with equally landmark resolutions. At any rate, the outcome of the Confab was already vitiated by the patently and blatantly undemocratic nature of its selection pattern.
To insist on the sacrosanct nature of the Jonathan Confab after an oppositional regime change has taken place is to pursue a covert and subterranean agenda. To put it bluntly, it is a PDP hobbyhorse. Fair must be fair. It is cruel and politically frivolous to expect another regime to implement the purported blueprint of a regime it has defeated particularly where and when that defeat was triggered by a nation-wide revulsion with the antics of the older regime. We can hold the Buhari administration down by what it has promised and failed to deliver on rather than what it has not promised.
Meanwhile as the final battle to restructure Nigeria gathers momentum, we must welcome General Ibrahim Babangida to the barricades. As the most successful and sophisticated coup-maker in the history of the country, he must have something to contribute to unlocking the gridlock.
