Tag: Rivers

God bless Patrick White, wherever the old contrarian chose to relocate to after his earthly sojourn. It was the great Australian novelist and 1973 Nobel laureate in Literature who once famously described rugby as a game of thugs writhing in mud. It was an unfriendly dig at the English Upper Class. Rugby, with its echoes of manliness and muscular menace, its refined violence and Public School pabulum, is a game very dear to the English upper crust. Unlike football, you can take rugby out of England but you cannot take the Englishness out of rugby.

There is rugby and there is rugby. It appears that the old Australian curmudgeon spoke too soon. He should have watched the royal mud show in Rivers, Nigeria. Something new always comes out of Africa. Perhaps due to the peculiar prehistoric configuration and wiring of the Blackman’s brains, it is easy to convert tragedy to comedy. In a life marked by unremitting adversity and misfortune, laughter is the best medicine and superior political therapy. The alternative is sure suicide This is why after spiritual mountebanks, professional comedians and other comic clowns are among the highest paid Nigerians.

Hip, hip, hurray! Welcome dear readers to the land of hippos and hipsters. It is called Hippotamia. It is a muddy swamp teeming with manatees, mermaids, mangrove mongoose, mammy waters, ocean going marsupials and other more menacing amphibious mammals. Here when thugs writhe in mud, they are engaged in political rugby which is a game more deadly and dangerous than the original. You can take the wrestling away from the mud wrestler but you cannot take away the mud. And when mud is thrown real hard, some of it is bound to stick.

In political rugby, the rule of engagement is that there is no rule of engagement and the golden mean is that there should be no golden mean. It is a free for all affray in which no weapon is too sacred or too profane to be pressed info urgent battle. The end will justify the mean. A legislative mace here, an official canister there to register the official presence of the cooperative and officiating police. If the law cannot be enforced, lawlessness must be enforced, leaving in the trail of anarchy broken limbs, bludgeoned heads and the inevitable overseas treatment.

It is a mystery as to why this murderous mud wrangling commands the attention of the stellar literati. Perhaps there is a muckraker in all of us. Like Patrick White, his illustrious predecessor, Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel laureate, has also waded into the muddy eddy. It will be recalled that the Nobel laureate authored a play titled The Swamp Dwellers. From the vintage muddy observatory, Soyinka has now noted with characteristic caustic candour that you can take a hippopotamus out of the mud but you cannot take the mud out of the hippopotamus. It was a Soyinkaesque display of wit at its most lapidary and lacerating.

But if the Nobel laureate thought that he had all the rugby ring to himself, he must be profoundly mistaken. There was a huge mud slide and the swamp dwellers rose in fury as if stung by a swamp scorpion. Even the hippotame—or hippodame—weighed in with characteristic robustness. Not one to take a direct shot lying low, the mother of all mermaids was overheard saying: “Yeye Yoruba man with him wuruwuru wig. If him get oblokos make him come near me with him yeye grammar. I go piss for him mouth.”

This was just a preliminary skirmish before the main tournament. The prize for perjury goes to internet mudslingers and other habitués of what Soyinka himself may describe as the murky madrassa of cybercreeps. Surveying the muddy melee from a safe distance snooper captured one of the alliterate writhers on Sahara asking Soyinka to go back to school to complete his PhD if he must talk. Now, now, now, asking a Nobel laureate in literature for his PhD is like asking Albert Einstein to go and fix his dodgy mathematics before he could pronounce. This is swamp-speak at its most glorious. It could get nastier.

All of which must tell us that it is a dangerous river to cross in Rivers State. The crisis in that state and its nuclear fallout are the most potent threat to the democratic process that we have seen so far. If care is not taken the entire process may slide down the muddy swamp. It is very curious that the crisis is unfurling in the presidential backyard, so to speak. Will a man set fire to his own backyard just to secure a political advantage? Jonathan must urgently review his strategy for remaining in office beyond 2015. It does not seem to be working for now.

To be sure, the ethnicization of presidential struggle is not a novel phenomenon in Nigeria. It is a symptom of a deeper and more fundamental malaise: the zero sum politics and winner takes all mindset of our political elite. It is a reflection of the fact that in Nigeria, power is sought not for national development but for primitive accumulation. This is the classic disease of a retarded political class. But as William Inge noted, a man can build for himself a throne of bayonets, whether he will be able to sit on it is another matter. Social cannibalism always leads to the real thing.

Although Jonathan is not the original brand owner, it should be noted that it is under his watch that the ethnicization of presidential politics has assumed its most dangerous and nation-threatening form. To be fair, this is partly due to the peculiar circumstances of his political ascendancy. He was the president from nowhere. Even the most riotous and raucous of his Ijaw hegemonists ought to have been taken by surprise at what seemed a divine and miraculous intervention in our body politic. What we have today is a siege mentality among Jonathan’s ethnic promoters. For a hitherto minority group to insist on hanging on to the presidency at all cost without the evidence of sterling performance or even elementary competence is going to be a bridge too far.

Politics is still a game of numbers. Having secured a pan-Nigerian mandate which was fraught and tense as it was revealing of the polarization of the country along regional, religious and economic lines, Jonathan ought to have commenced a process of national healing that would have led to a solid national consensus. It is only in this atmosphere that national transformation can thrive and blossom. But the past three years have seen Mr President at his most polarizing and divisive best. Even his original enablers have fled, ominously watching from the sidelines which way the mud slide will go.

In three years, Jonathan has succeeded in alienating critical and crucial stakeholders. The dominant tendencies in the two major hegemonic blocs appear to have distanced themselves from him, leaving him with his core ethnic supporters and the traditional carrion feeders from the east. A situation in which four northern governors would visit the presidential backyard only to be stoned and mobbed bespeaks a gathering political hysteria which does not bode well for democracy. Let us not tempt fate.

Now let us get this very clear. All this would not have mattered were Jonathan to be in the process of constructing a novel and revolutionary society which involves the smashing of old altars and political shrines. But Jonathan is anything but a revolutionary. He is a traditional politician relying on traditional wheeling and dealing. Yet elementary political common sense ought to have told him that you cannot alienate vital and significant interest groups in a nation and hope to reign or rule in peace.

Jonathan should take a historic cue. The august rumblings and ominous quietude from Nigeria’s traditional centres of power should tell their own story. This past week, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, the military henchman who birthed the Fourth Republic, rumbled from his Minna summit. The normally sedate and temperate Abubakar does not speak often or out of turn. But he noted tersely that the Royal Rugby in Rivers State is the gravest threat so far to democracy and the survival of the Fourth Republic. He must know what we don’t know. Even in Hippotamia too much frozen mud can lead to hypothermia.