Hope springs eternal in the human breast. But for it to have any chance against adversity, hope must be anchored on a sober assessment of reality and the existing balance of forces. Political wars are won neither by juvenile tantrums nor by infantile fantasies. The praxis of students’ mobilization is quite different from the modus operandi of conventional political husbandry.
Awolowo modernized the concept of mass mobilization for Nigeria through the Action Group and its mantra of permanent vigil and vigilance. “Gbogbo igba, E standby”. The Sardauna of Sokoto was the supreme strategist of the feudal rally for democratic contention. The man they call the Lion of Burdillion is the master of horizontal and vertical mobilization in contemporary Nigerian politics.
When Former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, famously transported the delegates he had assembled in a sealed train to the 1998 PDP convention in Jos and promptly bivouaked outside the city, he was deploying a classic military strategy to political hostilities. It worked for him and the rest is history.
Having neither demonstrated strategic innovation nor visionary resolve, has the time then come to write off our various youth movements as a potent and overriding force, if not the winning magical formula, in next year’s presidential sweepstakes? We have strategically delayed asking this question until now so as not to appear prematurely pessimistic. It can no longer wait.
For many who believe that youth is the ultimate political elixir, particularly in a bitterly divided and ethnically polarized nation, this must come as a sad development. When William Shakespeare famously observed that youth is a stuff that will not endure, he was referring to youthfulness as a wasting asset; a phenomenon with a timeline to come into its own and as a tangible talisman with its sell-by date. It is a perishable commodity whose lifespan cannot be negotiated.
Yet there is an even more profound sense to Shakespeare’s philosophical gem. In the tropics where things grow quickly and perish at an even more damning velocity, youth is a stuff that will not endure indeed. In the rumbling battlefield of political warfare, youth and youthful idealism perish quickly, and so do notions of youthful honour and integrity. Injury time does not recognize age. Actually the more callow the better for the grinding mill of savage politics.
The vicious hurly-burly of Equatorial politics is not particularly kind to youthful ardour. As sturdy limbs collapse under the weight of old contradictions, the visionary enterprise quickly surrenders to the visible enterprise. As idealism is forcibly prised from youth, what remains is the eternal youthfulness of idealism itself. In the age of absolute sinfulness, youthfulness is not a marker of distinction or integrity.
In the end, a fruit cannot fall very far from the parent tree. Their parents having eaten sour grapes, the children’s teeth are set at the edge. Having dispelled the illusion of youth as a political talisman in post-colonial entropy, two tasks are urgent and imperative. First, to subject the very concept of youth to a rigorous intellectual scrutiny. Second, to examine the implications of the collapse of the Youth movement as a veritable game-changer and paradigm-shifting third force in contemporary Nigerian party politics.
The very notion of youth as the sole game-changer in a troubled African polity is a fatuous non-starter, lacking in logical rigour and philosophical acuity; a function of political dysfunction. It is a sign of a politically traumatized society clutching at straw. Nobody can, and has ever legislated, the ascendancy of youth anywhere in the world.
In most cases, it depends on the contradictions of the society, the inner summons of the aspiring hero and the will to power. Jesus Christ was the supreme master of his domain before the age of thirty, Joan of Arc in her early teens. Alexander the Great had conquered half of the world before dying in his early thirties.
Napoleon Bonaparte did not wait for the French masses before clearing the bloody Jacobean mess. Frank Franco was the youngest general in the whole of Europe at a point and had attracted attention by the brutal efficiency with which he suppressed a local uprising in Spanish Morocco. Nelson of Trafalgar was a full admiral in his thirties.
This phenomenon is not restricted to Western societies or their institutions. Youths have played stirring roles in the evolution of Nigeria and African history. Patrice Lumumba, the great Congolese leader, was martyred in his thirties. Bode Thomas died in his thirties. Obafemi Awolowo seized the mantle of Yoruba leadership in his thirties. The most famous Yoruba obas of the twentieth century, including the iconic Sir Ladapo Ademola, the revered Sir Adesoji Tadeniawo Aderemi and the current Alaafin, Iku Baba Yeye Lamidi Adeyemi, were all crowned in their thirties.
When General Yakubu Gowon famously and expansively declared that life began at forty, he had already chalked up eight years as Nigeria’s supreme ruler. He was ousted shortly thereafter. After central authority collapsed following the July 1966 coup, Gowon was said to have become the ruler of the nation after a parade ground confrontation at Mugambo Barracks, Ikeja between him and his subordinate, the tempestuous Colonel Mohammed who was the actual leader of the military uprising.
In 1975, the story was told of how an unruly copper was summoned to Lagos by the Director of the NYSC, the then Colonel Solomon Omojokun. Calmly, Omojokun was said to have asked the corper, an aging hell-raiser from the University of Ife, how old he was. In a robust rebuff, Omojokun asked our man whether he knew he was actually older than the then military governor of the North Western state, Colonel Alhaji, later to tragically perish in the Sao Tome air crash. Before ordering the crestfallen corper back to his base, Omojokun wondered what would have happened if he was given a state to handle. The corper broke down in tears.
The point of all this is to demonstrate how sterling heroism and patriotism are not a function of age but a function of immanent personal qualities. Youthful age is not a determinant of sterling performance in office and should never be used as political blackmail. While this is not a vote for inept and senile gerontocracy, every individual must be judged on the basis of their demonstrated competence and adamantine integrity and not on the basis of age. While there are useless old people, there are also useless youngsters.
We should not conflate societies and historical epochs. Youthful idealism and heroism tend to thrive and function better in homogeneous societies driven by unanimity of core values and shared vision however much these exist in paradoxical antagonism. The type of mass movement which threw up Emmanuel Macron in France is impossible in a polity marked by ethnic, religious, regional and cultural polarization.
Ironically enough, this kind of mass movement is only possible among nationalities without the possibility of national linkage unless there is arduous bridge-building driven by consensus, compromise and conciliation. This is why regional parties have always come to grief in Nigeria when it comes to a national link-up. Anybody operating under the current political architecture who attempts the template of the European mass-movement as a model for coming to power in Nigeria has sounded his own political death-knell even before the bugle of battle.
Any youth hoping to ride over the roiling contradictions of contemporary Nigeria, if he is not willing to take to the bush as a guerrilla chieftain, is living in a fool’s paradise if he thinks the problem can be reduced to a few “aluta” harangues or commendable debating skills. It reminds one of why Leon Trotsky, a tested Soviet war veteran and hero of the Russian Revolution, dismissed Andre Malraux, De Gaulle’s beloved confidante and Minister of Culture, as “a purveyor of bureaucratic heroism in prudently proportioned slices”.
The immediate background to these reflections is the apparent collapse, in a hail of recrimination, of PACT, the superintending body for youthful presidential aspirants. The main aspirants in particular seem to have gone their individual way with Kingsley Moghalu in particular alleging perfidy and bad faith. He has since picked the ticket of a little known political outfit. It is all too reminiscent of a typical Nigerian political fiasco.
Yet the beginning was so redolent of hope and promise, of combustible energy and missionary fervour. There were many who thought that the Nigerian redeemers had come at last. A society in political trauma is always on the look for impossible miracles. But it has turned out to be too good to be true. The typical Nigerian factor was always lurking in the background, ready to spring its accustomed surprise.
The early warning signals came very early indeed. But there are many, yours sincerely included, who chose to ignore those damning signals. It was not over until it was over, we thought. There were many who in sheer desperation of hope began looking for the tell-tale signs of political sabotage. The usual suspects, particularly a compromised mainstream media fronting for its masters, were trotted out for political lynching.
Yet it ought to have been obvious to those politically discerning enough that the bizarre antics and juvenile public conduct of some of the aspirants could not have been in consonance with the higher seriousness expected of anybody on a national rescue mission, except in tropical Africa. Allegations of political gaming began to surface. There were ominous hints about some of the aspirants who were alleged to have been recruited by some of the major political aspirants just to ratchet up the stakes.
It is the deflowering of Nigerian youth. It is all but obvious that many of our youthful aspirants have reached the end of their tether. In the grime and soot of tropical political contention, youth is a stuff that will not endure indeed. 2019 is unlikely to be the year of the youthful aspirants. They will have to wait for another season.
It will be unwise to write off all of them. Some of them have shown promise and pluck. But in a polarized and heterogeneous society, much more is required to change the course of history. Developments in other spheres of the polity may help resolve some of the contradictions or push them into terminal collision with other emergent forces in the society. Until then, our youthful aspirants should go back to the drawing board.
