Tag: MOSCOW

Say oh Lord! The Sovereigof all dominions! You bestow power to whoever You wish and withdraw power from whoever You wish; You exalt whoever You wish and abase whoever you wish; In Your Hand lies all that is GOOD. You embed the night in the day and embed the day in the night; You bring forth the living from the dead as You bring forth the dead from the living. You grant sustenance to whoever you wish beyond reckoning” Q. 3: 26-27

Nights are pregnant. They invariably give birth to wonders during the days. All pleasant or sad events found in the records of history are often conceived in the night. The belly of nights is a mystery that cannot be easily unraveled   through the success or failure of human dreams. Man is a mere spectator watching the environmental drama going on in the theatre of life. He only reacts to the drama randomly as it affects his interest. The main actor in that drama is the phenomenon called destiny.

Rein of Power

In history, great empires and nations have reputation for rising to the pinnacle of their glory at a time. They also have the notoriety of falling unexpectedly to the abyss of life’s dungeon at another time when they might have reached the elasticity limit of their power wielding. And as it is with nations so it is with individual rulers.

In this, what obtained in the past still obtains in the present. And this confirms that humans are like flakes of history they rise today and fall tomorrow according to the dictates of momentary tempest. Yet the world surges ahead without looking back at them.

That is the situation which an Arab poet once observed very closely and put succinctly in a famous couplet that has become an axiom through the centuries. This is how he put it:

“Those are the situations of life as you can witness them; Whoever is gladdened by a situation today must be ready to be saddened by many other situations tomorrow”

There seems to be a striking similarity between the events and developments that precipitated the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialists Republic (USSR) and those prevailing in Nigeria today. In terms of culture, tradition, growth and development, the two countries may not have much in common but they significantly seem to share a common destiny that pilots their affairs separately. Like the defunct Soviet Union, Nigeria was forcefully fused together as a country in 1914 and subjected to the hegemony of the British colonial empire.

That was three years before the USSR came into existence as an amalgamated country in 1917.

Last year, Nigeria was said to be 100 years old in theory. But in practice, she remains a teething country crawling like a tortoise towards an unstable boat with which she aims to sail across the rough sea of life.

The Soviet Experience

For the Soviet Union, the 74 years between 1917 and 1991 can be described as the most turbulent in the 20th century history. That period symbolised the nearest signal towards the end of human world.

It was an era of blind ambition for mutual destruction between the capitalist West and the communist East of Europe through unbridled competition for unwarranted armament. It was an era that kept the existing historians of that time as busy as the bees in an active apiary.

In those years, the competition between capitalism which later came to be championed by the US and communism as championed by the USSR was so fierce that the entire world was incessantly restive. It took only the grace of Allah to keep our world peacefully propelled till date.

That frightening ideological Cold War however took a dramatic turn in December 1991 when the world watched helplessly as the awesomely mighty Soviet Union suddenly crumbled like a pack of cards and amazingly disintegrated into fifteen separate countries. According to analysts, “Its collapse was hailed by the West as a victory for freedom, a triumph of democracy over totalitarianism, and an evidence of the superiority of capitalism over socialism. The United States rejoiced as its formidable enemy was brought to its knees, thereby ending the Cold War which had swung ceaselessly like a pendulum over the two superpowers since the end of World War II. Indeed, the breakup of the Soviet Union transformed the entire world’s political situation thereby leading to a complete reformulation of political, economic and military realignments all over the globe”.

What led to that monumental historical event deserves a good study by students of international affairs but that is of less concern here than its political implications for contemporary Nigeria. Going the memory lane, one may recall that the Soviet Union was built on approximately the same territory as that of the Old Russian Empire that it succeeded. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 that brought the USSR into existence, the newly-formed government developed a Socialist philosophy with gradual and eventual transition to Communism. The philosophy was intended to overcome ethnic differences and create one monolithic state based on a centralised economic and political system. However, the iron rein of power led the government to transform USSR into a totalitarian state in which the Communist leadership had total control.

The Gorbachev Debacle

By the time the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, rose to power in 1985, the country had slipped into a situation of severe stagnation, with deep economic and political problems which required a ‘surgical operation’ to effectively confront and overcome. Recognising this situation on assumption of power, Gorbachev introduced a two-tier policy of reform. One was glasnost which meant freedom of speech; the other was perestroika meaning economic reform. And based on these two policies, Gorbachev released many political prisoners in February 1987 and called for the blank pages of Soviet history to be filled. He also renounced the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’ saying the Kremlin would no longer intervene militarily in the Eastern Bloc’s internal affairs. This was  interpreted to mean that the states in the Eastern bloc would henceforth become economically self-sufficient.

Glasnost was the cornerstone of alleviating Cold War tension aimed at drastically reducing Soviet military spending and creating an international reputation of a liberal leadership for Gorbachev.

In doing these, what Gorbachev did not realise was that by granting complete freedom of expression to the people, he was unwittingly removing the carpet of governance from his own feet. This meant that he inadvertently awakened in the people the insatiable economic yearnings and political emotions that had been bottled up for decades which could now become powerful enough to burst the bubble.

Unfortunately, Gorbachev’s policy of economic reform (perestroika) did not bring the immediate results which he had envisage and publicly predicted. The Soviet people, having become aggressively impatient, seized the opportunity of their newly granted freedom of speech to criticise Gorbachev for his failure to improve the country’s economy.

Thus, Gorbachev’s miscalculation led to un-foretold collapse of the Soviet Union at a time when some dozens of countries around the world were looking up to USSR for rescue from the claw of Western imperialism. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union with the intention of transforming the economy and easing Cold War tension because he realised that the USSR could no longer compete with the United States in the Cold War arms race as its economy had become significantly dwindled and far weaker than that of its rival.

While surging ahead with his ‘Reformation Agenda’ of glasnost and perestroika coupled with liberalisation of the Soviet military might, Gorbachev did not realise that what actually sustained communism for a long time in Eastern Europe was the Red Army which became neutralised.

He strongly believed that with the implementation of his two newly formulated policies the USSR could allow the Warsaw Pact states to operate autonomously without the threat of Soviet military intervention even as those countries remained allies to the Soviet Union.

 Brezhnev Doctrine

Hitherto, Gorbachev’s predecessor, Leonid Brezhnev’s policy towards the Eastern European Bloc, known as the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine,’ had forbidden any democratisation or economic integration with the West amongst Warsaw Pact states. And before Brezhnev, Joseph Stalin had also maintained the Eastern Bloc as Soviet’s satellite states through the threat of force. However brutal those previous policies looked, they were actually the cornerstone of the stability of the Soviet’s Eastern Blocs.  The main reason why the Eastern Europe remained communist and under the Soviet’s sphere of influence, was the use of the Red Army as an instrument of threat.

By September 1989 when Hungary opened its borders with Austria thereby paving way for East Germans to cross into West Germany through Austria it became obvious that communism was approaching its end. About eleven thousand East Germans thus fled the communist rule which indicated that a vivid anti-communist feeling had begun as people took to the streets to show their resentment. This culminated in the collapse of the Berlin Wall on the 9th of November, 1989 an incident that eventually led to the unification of Germany and the collapse of communism.

The West German population enjoyed a much higher living standard than that of the East, and therefore East Germany was willing to join West German governance. The East German thinking allowed the then Chancellor of West Germany, Helmut Kohl, to reunify Germany under Western conditions. This meant a reunified Germany would join NATO and the European Community. Gorbachev planned to allow cooperation between Europe’s capitalist and communist camps, but did not anticipate East Germany to join the capitalist camp outright.

That historic unification prompted the then President George H.W. Bush of the US to openly proclaim, during a November 1990 speech in Paris, that “the Cold War was over”. Thus, like Gorbachev, Nigeria’s Jonathan allowed a misconception of power by caving in to the parochial opinions of some political and religious rats at the corridor of his power to turn him into an ethnic President and a sectional religious captain both of which have now seriously become his political albatross.

 Doctrine of Necessity

The refusal of many African rulers to learn from the foregoing episodes led to their political downfall and descent into permanent oblivion. Such leaders had taken the will of the people for granted so much that they never thought of any possible downfall for themselves.

Going the memory lane, we can still recall the political tsunami that swept away such powerful African leaders such as Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, Jean Bede Bokasa of Central Africa Republic, Siad Bare of Somalia, Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo), Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor of Liberia, Laurent Gbagbo of Cote D’Ivoire, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Zainul Abidin of Tunisia and lately Blaise Campaore of Burkina Fasso as well as Saddam Hussein of Iraq. All of these came to power by what was called doctrine of necessity and they all went by that same doctrine.

Conclusion

For Nigerian leaders, there are many lessons to learn not only from the rise and fall of the Soviet Union as a country but also from the incidents of the listed past leaders of African States. Those episodes cannot be dismissed with the wave of the hand. It must be remembered that what brought President Jonathan to power in 2009 was the same doctrine of necessity which came up at the instance of the sickness and eventual death of President Umar Musa Yar’Adua. And that doctrine is not a mere hired usher. It is rather a political phenomenon that opens and closes the door of power according to necessity. If the door of power is pleasant at its entry point it must not be bitter to exit from it when the time comes.

When the Bolshevik regime led by Vladimir Lenin zoomed to power like an hurricane in 1917 hardly was it envisaged that it would end the way it did in 1991. Like the defunct Soviet Union, Nigeria is now toying with the tail of a tiger through what is manifestly becoming desperation with impunity. After an unwinding economic and political rigmarole which unprecedentedly precipitated insecurity in the land, the government seems to be reluctant to conduct a general election that had been scheduled over one year ago. The shoddy manner in which that announcement became a policy and the lopsidedness that characterized

the selection of participants in it as well as the dictatorial tendency it entailed have since polluted the environment with a stench of suspicion.

Besides ethnic and religious tendencies, two major factors are particularly militating against any doctrine of ‘incumbency must win’ around this time. One is the current fragility of the country as engendered by corruption and insecurity. The other is the will of the people to collectively pilot their affairs through the use of their ballot papers. The one is as sensitive as the other. In such a situation, to continue to pretend not to see or feel the presence of a surging furnace through a pervading fog is to be determined to sit on a keg of gunpowder without minding its consequences. Whoever rides on the back of a lion must think of how to alight from it. A Nigerian Gorbachev at this precarious time may be too costly for our country. God save Nigeria. If other leaders have failed in such a venture let no one think that he/she can be an exception. Tsunami knows neither ethnicity nor religion and sheer desperado with impunity can never be a panacea. Those who find no comfort in Moscow should try a sojourn in Siberia.

•NB: This article is republished here today based on popular demand by readers.

Say oh Lord! The Sovereign of all dominions! You bestow power to whomever You wish and withdraw power from whomever You wish; You exalt whomever You wish and abase whomever you wish; In Your Hand lies all that is GOOD. You embed the night into the day and embed the day into the night; You bring forth the living from the dead and You bring forth the dead from the living. You grant sustenance to whomever you wish beyond all reckoning” Q. 3: 26-27

Nights are pregnant. They invariably give birth to wonders during the days. All pleasant or sad events found in the records of history are often conceived in the night. The belly of nights is a mystery that cannot be easily explained through the success or failure of human dreams. Man is a mere spectator in the environmental drama going on in the theatre of life. He only reacts to that drama randomly as it affects his interest. The main actor in that drama is the phenomenon called destiny.

Rein of Power

In history, great empires and nations have reputation for rising to the peak of their glory at a time. They also have notoriety for falling unexpectedly to the abyss of life’s dungeon at another time when they might have reached the elasticity limit of their power wielding. And as it is with nations so it is with rulers. In this, what obtained in the past still obtains in the present. This confirms that humans are like flakes of history they rise today and fall tomorrow according to the dictates of momentary tempest. Yet the world surges ahead without looking back at them.

There seems to be a striking similarity between the events and developments that precipitated the fall of the Union Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and those prevailing in Nigeria today. The two countries may not have much in common but they significantly share a destiny that pilots their affairs separately. Like the defunct Soviet Union, Nigeria was forcefully fused together as a country in 1914 and subjected to the hegemony of the British colonial empire.

This year, Nigeria is said to be 100 years old in theory. But in practice, she is still a teething country crawling with her many tribes and tongues towards an unstable boat with which she wants to sail across the rough sea of life.

The Soviet Experience

For the Soviet Union, the 74 years that lay turbulent between 1917 and 1991 can be described as the most electrical in the 20th century history. That period symbolised the nearest signal towards the end of human world. It was an era of blind ambition for mutual destruction between the capitalist West and the communist East of Europe through unbridled competition for unwarranted armament. It was an era that kept the existing historians of that time as busy as the bees in an active apiary.

In those years, the competition between capitalism championed by the US and communism championed by the USSR was so fierce that the entire world was incessantly restive. It took only the grace of Allah to get our world propelled till date.

That frightening ideological Cold War however took a dramatic turn in December 1991 when the world watched helplessly with amazement, as the great Soviet Union, suddenly crumbled like a pack of cards and amazingly disintegrated into fifteen separate countries. According to analysts “Its collapse was hailed by the West as a victory for freedom, a triumph of democracy over totalitarianism, and an evidence of the superiority of capitalism over socialism. The United States rejoiced as its formidable enemy was brought to its knees, thereby ending the Cold War which had hovered over these two superpowers since the end of World War II. Indeed, the breakup of the Soviet Union transformed the entire world political situation, leading to a complete reformulation of political, economic and military realignments all over the globe”.

What led to that monumental historical event deserves a good study but it is of less concern here than its political implication for contemporary Nigeria. Going the memory lane, one may be recall that the Soviet Union was built on approximately the same territory as the Russian Empire of yore which it succeeded. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the newly-formed government developed a Socialist philosophy with gradual and eventual transition to Communism. The philosophy was intended to overcome ethnic differences and create one monolithic state based on a centralised economic and political system. However, this State built on a Communist ideology, was later transformed into a totalitarian state in which the Communist leadership had total control.

However, the project of creating a unified, centralised socialist state proved problematic for many reasons some of which are as follows:

1.The pioneer leaders underestimated the extent to which the non-Russian ethnic groups in the country (which comprised more than fifty percent of the total population of the Soviet Union) could resist assimilation into a ‘Russianised’ State.

2.The central government’s economic planning failed to meet the needs of the State, which was caught up in a vicious arms race with the United States. This led to gradual economic decline that eventually necessitated the need for reformation.

3.The Communist ideology which the Soviet Government worked hard to plant in the hearts of its populace, never took firm root because it was incompatible with the primordial economic culture with which people were familiar. Eventually, the government lost whatever influence it had originally wielded.

The Gorbachev Debacle

By the time the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, rose to power in 1985, the country had slipped into a situation of severe stagnation, with deep economic and political problems which required a ‘surgical operation’ to effectively confront and overcome. Recognising this situation on assumption of power, Gorbachev introduced a two-tier policy of reform. One was glasnost which meant freedom of speech; the other was perestroika meaning economic reform. And based on these, Gorbachev released many political prisoners in February 1987 and called for the blank pages of Soviet history to be filled. He also renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine saying the Kremlin would no longer intervene militarily in the Eastern Bloc’s internal affairs. This was closely related interpreted to mean that the states in the Eastern bloc would become economically self-sufficient. Glasnost was the cornerstone of alleviating Cold War tensions aimed at drastically reducing Soviet military spending and creating an international reputation of a liberal leader for Gorbachev.

In doing these, what Gorbachev did not realise was that by granting complete freedom of expression to the people, he was unwittingly removing the carpet of governance from his own feet. This meant that he inadvertently awakened in the people the insatiable economic yearnings and political emotions that had been bottled up for decades and could now become powerful enough to burst the bubble. Unfortunately, his policy of economic reform did not bring the immediate results which he had envisage and publicly predicted. The Soviet, haven become aggressively impatient, seized the opportunity of their newly granted freedom of speech to criticise Gorbachev for his failure to improve the country’s economy.

Thus, Gorbachev’s miscalculation led to un-foretold collapse of the Soviet Union at a time when some dozens of countries around the world were looking up to USSR for rescue from the claw of Western imperialism. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union with the intention of transforming the economy and easing Cold War tensions because he realised that the USSR could no longer compete with the United States in the Cold War arms race as its economy was far weaker than that of its rival.

While surging ahead with his ‘Reformation Agenda’ of glasnost and perestroika coupled with liberalisation of the Soviet military might, Gorbachev did not realise that what actually sustained communism for a long time in Eastern Europe was the Red Army which he came neutralise. He strongly believed that with the implementation of his two newly formulated policies the USSR could allow the Warsaw Pact states to operate autonomously without the threat of Soviet military intervention even as those countries remained allies to the Soviet Union.

Brezhnev Doctrine

Hitherto, Gorbachev’s predecessor, Leonid Brezhnev’s policy towards the Eastern European Bloc, known as the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine,’ had forbidden any democratisation or economic integration with the West amongst Warsaw Pact states. And before Brezhnev, Joseph Stalin had also maintained the Eastern Bloc as Soviet’s satellite states through the threat of force. However brutal those previous policies looked, they were actually the cornerstone of the stability of Soviet’s Eastern Blocs. The main reason why the Eastern Europe remained communist and under the Soviet’s sphere of influence, was the use of the Red Army as an instrument of threat.

By September of 1989 when Hungary opened its borders with Austria thereby paving way for East Germans to cross into West Germany through Austria it became obvious that communism was approaching its end. About eleven thousand East Germans thus fled the communist rule which indicated that a vivid anti-communist feeling had begun as people took to the streets to show their resentment. This culminated in the collapse of the Berlin wall on the 9th of November, 1989 and incident that eventually led to the unification of Germany and the collapse of communism.

The West German population enjoyed a much higher living standard than that of the East, and therefore East Germany was willing to join West German governance. The East German thinking allowed the Chancellor of West Germany, Helmut Kohl, to reunify Germany under Western conditions. This meant a reunified Germany would join NATO and the European Community. Gorbachev planned on allowing cooperation between Europe’s capitalist and communist camps, but did not anticipate East Germany to join the capitalist camp outright.

That historic unification prompted the then President George H.W. Bush of the US to openly proclaim, during a November 1990 speech in Paris, that the Cold War was over.

Conclusion

For Nigeria, there are many lessons to learn from the rise and fall of the Soviet Union which cannot be taken for granted. When the Bolshevik regime led by Vladimir Lenin zoomed to power like a hurricane in 1917, hardly was it envisaged that it would end the way it did in 1991. Like the defunct Soviet Union, Nigeria is now toying with the tail of a tiger through what is called National Confab. After a seemingly unwinding economic and political rigmarole, President Goodluck Jonathan decided to grab a blind bull by the horn. He suddenly announced on October 1, 2013, the readiness of his government to organise a National Dialogue that later came to be known as National Confab. The shoddy manner in which that announcement became experimented and the lopsidedness that characterised the selection of participants in it as well as the dictatorial tendency it entailed have since polluted the environment with a stench of suspicion.

Two major factors, besides ethnic and religious, are particularly militating against the Confab at this material time. One is the current fragility of the country and the freezing tension of the coming 2015 general election. The other is lack of legal backing for it. The one is as dangerous as the other. And the multifarious protests and agitations against it across the country are a confirmation of this assertion.

To continue to pretend not to see or feel the presence of a surging furnace behind a pervading fog is to be determined to sit on a keg of gunpowder. He who rides on the back of a lion must think of how to alight from it. A Nigerian Gorbachev at this precarious time may be too costly for our country. God save Nigeria.