The Nation Newspaper

Tag: perspective

  • International relations in historical perspective – 3

    The evolution of the modern concept of international politics could be said to have begun in 1648 with the end of the Thirty Years’ War which was concluded by the Treaty of Westphalia. In spite of this recognition of sovereignty of states in the European system, it did not stop the outbreak of wars. A philosopher such as Geog Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) who was to rise to the prestigious position of professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin argued in one of his books the Philosophy of Right that in the march of human history, dialectical clashes between nations advanced the course of human civilization. Nationalists, particularly in the divided German and Italian states quickly embraced this new philosophy which saw nothing wrong in wars, especially those arising from the quest for national Risorgimento. Coinciding with the rise of Hegelianism was the unification of Germany and Italy, a development that was to radically revolutionise international relations.

    Since the emergence of nation states like France and England as major players in the game of international politics, there has been a move towards two trends in international relations. The first trend was the idea that a state’s policy should be dominated by what it considers its national interest. It does not really matter whether this national interest is maintained by diplomacy, deception, duplicity or war. This concept of raison d’etat dominated the thinking and action of Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu (1585-1642). He was Chief Minister of France from 1624 to 1642. Being a Prince of the Church, one would have expected that he would champion the cause of the Holy Roman Empire and the universal Catholic Church. Richelieu came into office in 1624 when the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand 11 was attempting to revive Catholic universality, stamp out Protestantism and establish imperial control over the princes of, particularly the German speaking states and statelets of central Europe. What did Richelieu do? Under him, raison d’etat replaced the medieval concept of universal moral values as the operating principles of French policy. By the time of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) each of the principal powers of Europe namely Denmark, Sweden and France reduced Central Europe into human waste and by the time the war ended the German population of Central Europe was reduced by a third.

    During the course of this struggle, Richelieu was able to expand the territories of France eastwards to encompass what later became the disputed provinces of Lorraine and Alsace. Few statesmen can claim a greater impact on history than this man. Richelieu was the father of the modern state system. Absolute devotion to the promotion of a state’s national interest, through the example of what Richelieu accomplished for France became the dominant theory and practice of international relations. The success of this policy of raison d’etat elicited another trend of balance of power politics in order to ensure that France did not impose an absolute hegemony on Europe. These two ideas, which started as facts of life and later as a system of international relations, were to dominate the international system for the next 100 years.

    Even when Napoleon upset the working of the balance of power during his conquests in Europe, he was eventually brought down by coalition of forces in which Great Britain played a dominant role. This again introduced another theme into European politics in which even though separated from Europe by the English Channel, Britain’s national interest moved her to intervene in Continental European politics to ensure that no one single country dominated the affairs of Europe. After the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, the peace of Europe was maintained through the contrivance of balance of power politics and Europe acting in concert to maintain peace and to ensure legitimacy of European regimes and institutions.

    The architect of this policy of Concert of Europe was the cosmopolitan Austrian Chancellor Prince Clemens Wenzel Lothar Metternich (1773-1859) who was committed to maintaining the status quo in Europe and stamping out the spirit of nationalism which was antithetical to the interest of the ramshackle Austro-Hungarian Empire of several nationalities. This policy worked hand in hand with the traditional policy of national interest. The British Foreign Secretary and later Prime Minister, Henry John Temple, Third Viscount Palmerston (1784-1865) articulated this policy when on becoming foreign secretary in 1830, a position which he was to hold for years until becoming prime minister himself, said,

    “When people ask me … for what is called a policy, the only answer is that we mean to do what may seem to be best upon each occasion as it arises, making the interests of our country one’s guiding principle”

    “We have no eternal allies and no permanent enemies”, said Palmerston “our interests are eternal and those interests it is our duty to follow”.

    The policy of raison d’etat coupled with the policy of concert of Europe was built around a shifting coalescence of interests of Britain and Austria. For almost half a century this policy worked until the wars of German unification and Italian 11 Risorgimento introduced the potent force of nationalism, which had remained dormant since the French revolution. The emergence of Count Camillo Benso di Cavour (1810-1861) and Prince Otto Edward Leopold Von Bismarck (1815-1898) led to the modification of an old idea of national interest. This modification came in the form of a policy of realpolitik in international affairs.

    By this is meant accepting the world as one finds it and making the best use of the situation. The ideal world is utopian and can only be found in the realm of ideas, but the political world is dominated by struggle and national interest. The aim of nations was acceptably the avoidance of wars and the preservation of peace, preferably through diplomacy, but when all other options failed, war in the words of Karl Von Clausewitz (1780-1831) is politics by other means. This idea of realpolitik became the dominant idea of international relations until the eve of the First World War.

    This concept was not confined to Europe, as the earlier ideas were. It began to influence even American and Japanese politics. Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) who became the 26th president of the United States in 1901 and remained in office until 1909 was closer to European practitioners of the politics of realpolitik than any American politician of his age. He was as much an imperialist as Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoigne Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903) who with Bismarck and Jules Francois Camille Ferry (1832-1903) were responsible for the European partition of Africa and South East Asia as well as the intervention in China to carve out spheres of influence.

    Theodore Roosevelt not only fought against the Spanish government in Cuba before becoming president and in fact rode into the White House as a war hero. He in fact, parroting Bismarck’s comment, said,

    “if I must choose between a policy of blood and iron and one of milk and water… I am for the policy of blood and iron. It is better not only for the nation but in the long run for the world”

    American diplomacy had always been characterised by an idealism based on isolationism and non-intervention in the politics of Europe for fear of European entanglements. This policy had been an article of faith since the presidency of James Monroe (1758-1831), the fifth president of the United States. Theodore Roosevelt brought into American foreign policy the tradition of realism which would continue to struggle with the traditional American ideas of morality and idealism in foreign relations.

     

  • Party deformation in perspective

    Party deformation in perspective

    Party formations in post-military Nigeria are in a serious crisis. But this much should be expected in a military assisted democracy and from societies in the throes of traumatic transition from despotic rule to a democratic empowerment of citizens. It is usually a tense and fraught process with the possibility of reversal and regression. Since there is no global roadmap for recovery and recuperation, every nation is a unique patient with its own unique pathologies .

    In such circumstances, even the fundamental principles of party formations in modern societies are called to question. However, in countries that have successfully weathered the inclement storm of autocratic and anti-democratic adversities, notably in Ghana, South Africa and Latin America, there has always been one cultural product which makes a signal and significant contribution. That is the quality of human capital at the apex of leadership.

    This is why it is unfortunate that while party formations in Nigeria are in serious crisis and the country itself is roiling in deep dysfunction, the ruling party, the PDP, the self-advertised largest party on the continent, should be openly squabbling about posts. For a party that has ruled Nigeria for all of 14 years since the departure of the military, the PDP is nothing short of a national tragedy after the opportunity cost to the nation has been factored in.

    The fixation of its ranking members on the politics of allocation of resources devalues politics as a struggle for the allocation of values. The degeneration of politics to a fierce struggle for state loot hobbles everything in its wake because it makes it impossible for political society to operate at a level compatible with the more refined ethos of a truly civilized polity. This subsistence politics with its violent and crude Hunter-gatherer code of conduct reduces everybody in its orbit to the level of primitive cave-dwellers.

    In the end, nothing probably could beat the brilliant description of the PDP by one of its founding fathers as a rally. Rallies are usually very riotous and sometimes have to be broken up when they degenerate to sheer anarchy. The political preferences of this column are very well known, but since we are talking about the crisis of party formation, we are talking about a crisis of the nation-state.

    A national crisis is not an opportunity for crude recrimination or insult-vending. But it must be noted for the benefit of analytical clarity that unlike some of its lesser competitors that can be held down to and measured against some professed ideals, the PDP, despite its array of organic intellectuals and free-floating technocrats, boasts of no ideology apart from a nebulous pan-Nigerianism which masks its true provenance as a mere power-grabbing machine.

    Yet it must also be stated that until the opposition groups transcend their own limitations, the PDP will remain rampart and rampaging and they will remain its mere dialectical mirror image. In an under-developing nation, power grabbing is a cogent manifesto because it puts food on the table and under the table as the case may be and until the ghosts also summon themselves to the banquet. In fact, until the opposition parties come up with the formula for a merger or mega-alliance, the next supper is not the Last Supper and the political gourmets will continue to dine in some style. The mind boggles not just at the culinary logistics of making a meal of a whole country and the crude arithmetic of the feeding frenzy.

    For the sake of objective analysis, and as it is at the moment, the Peoples’ Democratic Party is a prebendalist machine for scientific extortion and extraction; a perfect instrument of primitive accumulation based on industrial corruption. The savage oxymoron of this formulation is a perfect example of what happens when instances of old feudal formations take on the garb of modernity and its cutting edge technology. When prebendalism which is a throwback to old feudal Europe becomes a modern phenomenon and when corruption is industrialised, scientific precision is brought to bear on primitive extractive predation. The nation is frozen in a time-warp. Cavemen parade as statesmen.

    But we cannot complain too loudly about the sluggishness of a river in midstream without examining its source. It is only through this kind of holistic analysis that we can achieve true illumination of our precarious predicament. Like its old forebears, the PDP is a product of certain structural, political and economic configuration of Nigeria as engineered by the dominant faction of the old military and as designed by the original colonial conquerors of modern Nigeria.

    In the event, it is doubtful whether the two military transitions we have had so far are real transitions from military rule to genuine democracy or a mere transfer of power and personnel for the same predatory purposes. In business parlance, it was just a shuffling of Holdings. The same can be said for flag independence and the ceding of power to an indigenous political elite which did not represent a fundamental rupture of political praxis but a continuation of colonization by other means.

    In the case of colonial transition, power was ceded to a compliant and complacent political class superintended by a master-nationality which had demonstrated superior political organization and the military initiative required to hold down the country by feudal fiat or by force if and when it became inevitable. In the subsequent political order, only the Action Group, of all the major parties, showed signs of a discernible and coherent ideology and a master plan for national development but was regarded as the most dangerous customer by both the departing colonial masters and their local inheritors. The party was to suffer savage persecution.

    For Nigeria’s ancient and modern power-masters, ideology does not matter and neither does a master plan or even democracy. But as we have been taught in school, this is also an ideology and a default master plan , a modern manual for political and economic bankruptcy and a cover for anti-democratic gaming. Famously, General Obasanjo, the superintending military Caesar of the first transition, rumbled that it was not always the case that the best man would win a political contest.

    Up till that point, the relationship between Awo and the military establishment had been wary and cagey. Despite the admiration of many ranking officers for his sterling personal qualities, the dominant military establishment viewed the Ikenne titan as a dangerous customer and a threat to their collective aspiration which they equated with national stability and order.

    In fairness to Obasanjo, he had tried to help the old man broaden his national base and appeal by transferring him from the chancellorship of the then University of Ife to Ahmadu Bello University. But in all his political career, the late philosopher-politician had fought against the homogenization of the Nigerian ruling class which was not based on principles and shared ideals. It was a non-starter. An earlier warm and cosy relationship with the urbane and affable Governor Robert Adeyinka Adebayo had ended in a public spat over the Agbekoya uprising.

    Chief Awolowo repeatedly insisted during his epic campaigns that he was not interested in probing the military as an institution. It was the wise thing to say. But as the heat of political commotion got to him, the old man issued a tense clarification. While he was not interested in probing the military as an institution, any departing military officer who wandered into the murky waters of partisan politics would have his background subjected to “searching scrutiny”. It was the shortest and sharpest political suicide note in post-colonial history. It led to a frantic and messy exit for the military through a legal legerdemain of dubious mathematical provenance.

    With General Babangida’s permanent transition, we got to the realm of political football with neither fixed goalposts nor fixed time. Injury time began immediately after the referee’s whistle. The game ended abruptly after an angry crowd invaded the pitch. The umpire lost his empire and almost his life. Babangida had famously quipped that while he did not know who would succeed him, he knew who would not. It became a self-fulfilling anti-democratic prophesy. Babangida was forced to hand over as a holding device—or is it Holdings device?— to a colourless interim contraption. Three months after, the military dropped all pretences and swept back to power.

    It is this anti-democratic gaming that is the basis, genesis and nemesis of the Fourth Republic. In a supreme instance of irony, when General Obasanjo collected back power in !999 from General Abubakar, he was doing so from the parade ground commander who bade him farewell as a departing military head of state twenty years earlier. But no two historical conjunctures are similar. Obasanjo’s erstwhile military subordinates were ceding power to him based on a constitution he himself admitted he had not seen up till that moment.

    In the event, the “constitution” turned out as an explosive-laden device; a patchwork of incoherent rambling that vouches for the people without the people and with the sole aim of indemnifying the departing military against loss and loss of face. Fronting for this historic fraud as usual is a grand coalition of “big” people from all over the national spectrum, a coalition of contraries without any shared notions or beliefs except a shared obsession for capturing power for the sake of loot.

    But it must be obvious to even a political fool that you cannot continue to gourmandize on the national cake without baking something in return. Both the cake and the nation will disappear one day. In its classical incarnation, the nation-state paradigm was designed as a wealth and cake-creating machine meant to liberate humanity from the throes of feudal servitude and the realm of feral necessity where people are not better than foraging animals. As it is evident in Jonathan’s tragic presidency, the “turn by turn solution” is no solution because it is based on preferment without principles and eating without first sweating.

    As we can see, the PDP is a victim of its own provenance and genesis. Its implosion is almost inevitable. As it is today, it is like a sealed pool of barracudas that have sniffed blood. We must pity the poor man from Otueke who does not seem to comprehend the Leviathan nature of the forces ranged against him. If the PDP implodes without a clear alternative, then it is going to be a national catastrophe of unimaginable magnitude. Stateless Somali would be a child’s play.

    To our beleaguered compatriots, it should be clear that much as this is a crisis of party formation and democratization, it is also a fundamental crisis of nationhood. But if we get the crisis of party formation and democratization off our back, we may find ourselves in an advantageous position to resolve the crisis of nationhood. What is needed now is a broad-based national movement of all known agencies of peaceful change which will come up with a blueprint for national emancipation and act as a countervailing force to a failing and flailing PDP. If Jonathan wants to aid the process and retain a measure of the initiative, then he should urgently set in motion the mechanism for the convocation of an Emergency National Summit that will take a critical look at Nigeria since 1914.

  • Mimiko’s victory in perspective

    Mimiko’s victory in perspective

    Given the circumstances, it is very tempting to have a complete misreading of the outcome of the October 20 governorship election in Ondo State in which the incumbent, Dr Olusegun Mimiko, was declared the winner. More foreboding, the significance on Yoruba politics and democracy in general could easily be lost.

    Some people have erroneously proposed the election as a direct contest between Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and his lieutenants like Osun Governor, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola on one hand and Governor Mimiko on the other.

    To begin with, neither Asiwaju Tinubu nor Ogbeni Aregbesola was a candidate in the election. Rotimi Akeredolu was the candidate of their party, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN). What they did was to deploy their political and campaign skills into Akeredolu’s governorship project. It was the same way Edward Kennedy poured himself into the Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. What they did for Akeredolu was no different from what they did for Adam Oshiomhole in Edo, Abubakar Audu in Kogi, James Akpanudoedehe.

    in Akwa Ibom and Steve Ugbah in Benue State. It’s the same intensity, panache and wits. There is nothing unusual and nothing to be ashamed of.

    If Aregbesola threatened that he was going to drive out Mimiko from office prior to the October 20 election, it was a legitimate political statement consistent with his standing as a leader in ACN. What would have been bizarre would have been for him to promise to support Mimiko for a second term when his party was going to field a candidate for that election.

    The first duty of a political party is to contest electoral offices by fielding candidates and seeking to win. A political party stands for something in terms of ideology, values, tradition, programmes, development agenda etc. When people vote for a candidate of a political party, they are indeed buying into these. The ACN for instance stands for progressivism. This is the tradition directly descended from Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the father of progressive politics in Nigeria. It is a tradition of Fabian socialism with its hallmark of egalitarianism, human development and social welfare. In contrast, a party like Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is descended from a tradition of hierarchy, big money, plutocracy and neo-feudalism.

    When these parties campaign, this is what they try to sell and those who vote for them have wittingly or unwittingly bought these products, assuming that the election is free and fair. The tendency though is that a party like PDP will see democracy as a system of power, rather than a platform for providing choice for the people and would therefore not have the slightest compunction in rigging and manipulating election as long as it serves the purpose of either getting its members into power or keeping them in it.

    Nevertheless, it is the raison d’etre of a political party to contest elections, seek to win where it was excluded from power and consolidate on where it holds sway.

    This point is very important in light of the negative campaign of the Mimiko campaign team and sections of the media who either don’t know what democracy is about or have conveniently forgotten that parties seek to win election and were accusing ACN of seeking to extend its influence to Ondo State. To put the records straight, ACN had sought to expand its reaches to other places and narrowly lost in places like Anambra and other aforementioned states where its governorship candidate is now a senator of the Federal Republic. It simply beggars belief how supposedly ‘enlightened’ people will urge a political party not to contest election in a particular place because that party is strong in the region.

    This point is overstretched and expanded into the ‘alien’ and ‘Lagos invaders’ hysteria that ran through the campaign. If this logic is to hold water, only one election is to ever be held in a country and the parties should just be allowed to rule indefinitely in any territory where they win the first election. The Labour Party for instance that had no political base prior to 2008 in Ondo State cannot and should be disqualified from contesting any election anywhere in the country. Of course, this will be absurd, but those who take a position forget to reconcile their position with a bigger principle.

    It is interesting to note that the Mimiko campaign was never about any issue, development agenda or a solid base of first term achievement. Rather, it ran seamlessly on the divisive tide of rejecting the Lagos invaders and a godfather. If we are to accept for a second that Ondo people indeed rejected the Lagos invaders and a godfather, it means Ondo people have alienated themselves from the greater Yoruba agenda and the march of history.

    On the face value, the consequence of this would have been political isolation of Ondo State by other Yoruba states. But this is not an option. This is the Ondo of Papa Adekunle Ajasin, Papa Adebayo Adefarati and other titans of Awolowo school of political leadership. It fills me with trepidation to think that the Ondo that drove out Akin Omoboriowo in 1983 in order to enforce the enthronement of Adekunle Ajasin who was the candidate of Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), Awolowo (Baba Ijebu)’s party, has now degenerated into an insular and other-Yoruba-hating enclave.

    Of course, there are Ondo indigenes in Lagos and other Yoruba states, doing business and occupying positions of political leadership. If an Ondo indigene for instance is keen, he or she can be a governor in Lagos State that has become the avatar of Yoruba accommodation and openness. In Osun, there are frontline members in the Aregbesola government who are from Ondo State and are in every sense at home. That is the way it has always been and should be in Yorubaland. Some people, however, for their own selfish reason, have for the first time brought this divisiveness into Yorubaland and are being cheered on in evil mischief by a section of the media.

    It will however be unfair to ascribe this unwholesome development to Ondo people who indeed are as progressive and well-meaning as they come. This is no exaggeration – Ondo people are the nicest people you can ever have as your neighbour. I speak from a rich experience.

    Those who engineered this campaign represented nobody but themselves and spoke for no one other than themselves. More importantly, Governor Mimiko was declared winner for fulfilling the requirements of the Electoral Act which states that a winner must have at least one third of the total votes cast in two thirds of the local governments. This interestingly translates into a paltry 260,199, representing only 40 per cent of the total votes and certainly less than two per cent of the population of the whole state. I have no problem with this. Democracy is about the rule of law.

    It will be unfair however to hold Ondo people responsible for this mea culpa. It is one of the imperfections of democracy that a supposedly democratic election would produce a most unusual outcome. This confirms again the notion that democracy only offers a platform for choice but does not guarantee a rational one. The people however will have to live with the consequences of their choice, good or bad.

    Our consolation however is in the words of the Nobel Laureate that nowhere in the natural order of things does a mere bird of passage determine the fundamentals of the terrain over which it has flown. This present darkness will surely pass.

    • Fasure writes from Osogbo