The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Snooper

  • A milestone…. of sorts

    Snooper does not like talking about the man behind the mask, that is, the pipe smoking gnome behind the weekly sorties. Howard Hughes, the reclusive American billionaire, once noted that too much self exposure and unwarranted self-revelation lead to self-demystification and the loss of mystique. (If you  believe the loony hermit actually said that, then you are in for a big ride).

    But there are some milestones in the life of an individual that are worth celebrating, if only for the illuminating light they throw on the trajectory of a society. How does it feel to be reading yourself for the first time in a national daily, and at a time when newspapers were few and far between? It is like eavesdropping on your own solitary ruminations or savouring the arrival of glorious dawn on a lonely beach.

    This week marks the forty fifth anniversary of the columnist’s first appearance in national print in an article published in the Nigerian Tribune on February 16th, 1971 when yours sincerely was a teenage reporter/ proof reader in that famous organization. Thank you, Chief Fola Oredoyin, the Chief sub-editor at the foreign desk at The Nigeria Tribune at that point in time, for publishing the piece. And thank you the dapper and unflappable Chief Olukayode Bakre, the editor of The Nigerian Tribune at that point in time, for fervently believing in and adoring a boy you considered a child prodigy.

    Titled “Powell and the coloured immigrants”, it was a blistering attack on Enoch Powell, the British politician whose racist comments on immigration stoked up the fire of a looming apocalypse in Britain as a result of the hordes of coloured immigrants sweeping through the island. The article took Powell to stiff task over his inflammatory remarks which divided and completely polarized the Conservative Party in particular and Great Britain in general.

    Enoch Powell was no empty rabble-rouser like the American Donald Trump. With his icy stare and donnish imperiousness, he was a master of the brilliant and devastating putdown. But he allowed the virus of hatred and racial bigotry to consume his own career.  Although a full Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney in Australia at the precociously early age of twenty five, there was little to show that the ancient humanities actually humanized the Conservative M.P from the British Midlands.

    There were private whispers about his mental health.  For centuries after the revolution, Britain had tried to forge a national consensus based on liberality, tolerance and order, a tradition in which the gentleman is expected to wear his hat and opinion lightly, as Terry Eagleton, the Anglo-Irish Marxist hell-raiser , famously put it.

    But Powell  would have none of this one-nation High Tory fudge. He was as hard as he was uncompromising and as a result of his extreme right wing views, he was never to achieve the towering stature in British politics commensurate with his dazzling intellectual talents. In a feat of clairvoyance , Powell himself once famously noted that all political careers end in failure.

    A few weeks after the Powell article, snooper was dramatically catapulted over the head of several elderly veterans of close marking both on and off the galley proofs and grizzled warriors of state inspired mayhem to a sub-editorship in the daring and iconoclastic newspaper. This meant a ringside sneak preview of those hard-hitting Tribune editorials of mysterious provenance which promptly arrived at the editor’s desk without anybody knowing how and where they materialized from. It must remain a trade secret.

    It was one of these remarkable salvoes and editorial broadsides that would cause trouble a few weeks later. In protest against the confirmation and selection of the then Prince Lamidi Olayiwola Adeyemi as the new Alaafin of Oyo, the newspaper wrote a pungent hard-hitting editorial titled: We Shall be back to Square One. It was an incredibly daring and defiant thing to do, but then The Nigerian Tribune did not earn its celebrated spurs on the basis of pacifist advocacy.

    However, as it is nowadays, so it was in those days. State moles plying their furtive and sinister trade abound. A few minutes to midnight and as the newspaper was about to put to bed, Brigadier Robert Adeyinka Adebayo’s men came calling, sacking and ransacking everywhere as they impounded the impoundable and abducted the abductable. It was over in a few brisk minutes culminating in a disorderly rout and a disorganized retreat through Oke Sapati on to the Minor Seminary and from there to Oke Padi and the bowels of commercial Ibadan. The sword had made a short shrift of the pen, but only for the moment.

    Among the lucky survivors of that military siege was a young, intrepid and enterprising reporter who had earlier covered the Kunle Adepeju murder for the paper. Gabriel Ajayi’s sturdy limbs and power of acceleration foreshadowed a glorious military career that would be cruelly and callously terminated by military despotism.  Twenty four years after in 1995 just as Colonel Ajayi was being sentenced to death by Abacha’s phoney Tribunal simply for serving as secretary to a panel which asked for the de-annulment of the June 12 election, snooper was also heading for exile. Memories are made of these.

  • The Children of Barabbas

    Snooper apologises ahead to some of our numerous readers for this rather heavy-going piece, but it is in the nature of the business at hand.  You can take a man out of his professorial habitat, but you cannot take the professorial habitat out of a man. An unhappy consciousness stalks the land. This deep distress and disappointment with everything and everybody manifests itself in many ways. Nigerian kids are no longer napping. They are kidnapping. And kidnapping is a serious business, like the stealing of a nation’s patrimony by a criminal elite.

    The kidnappers do not appropriate the patrimony of a nation directly; they do it by indirect labour. And in so doing, they stand the whole logic of patrimony on its head. The kid has become the real father of the man. Welcome to the kidnappers manifesto; or, Barabbas Syndrome.

    Barabbas Syndrome is the latest manifestation of our peculiar post-colonial condition. At least a malignant psychological ailment like Oedipus complex is straightforward enough. Every son, according to Freud, drawing on the Sophoclean drama, wants to marry his mother after killing his father. For Freud, this is the primal motive of human existence and the root of all human conflicts.

    But Barabbas Syndome is not so clear and straightforward. It is indeed a different kettle of fish. It is a dark and deeply recondite drama of human existence itself, full of contradictory impulses and motives, some of these noble and heroic; others criminal and perverted. The kidnappers are criminals because, lacking in ideological education, they seek to disrupt the order of corruption rather than the corruption of order. But in disrupting the order of corruption, they may worsen the corruption of order, which is not a bad thing at all.

    Herein surfaces the difficulties and troubling complications at the heart of the Barabbas story. But before we come to elucidate on this, the unhappy consciousness, its ideological soul-mate, beckons. The unhappy consciousness has been with humankind since the dawn of the human society. The absolute discomfort with one’s lot and one’s society is the driving force behind all phenomenal occurrences in civilization and hence of human evolution itself.

    Anybody closely monitoring the contemporary Nigerian society in all its riotous disequilibrium will notice the unhappy consciousness at work in every facet of our national life. Even if it occludes or elides itself in circuitous ideological camouflage, it is there. It is there in politics, it is there in the economy, it is there in religion, and it is there in the traditional concept of marriage which is vast dissolving as new economic realities take a grenade to the feudal set up where women were thought to be the lower gender. Finally, it is there in the intellectual space as every article attracts hundreds of furious and frank rejoinders.

    The intellectual ferment in Nigeria today, replete with émigré bazooka, is reminiscent of pre-Revolution Russia when the Russian people finally caught up with the idiocies and odiousness of Tsarist rule and the bankruptcy of the ancient class. But of all these disruptions of the epistemic logic on which the crumbling order is based, none is more potentially devastating than the rising wave of armed critiques of the nation-in- crisis whether it emanates from ethnic, regional, religious or sheer class disaffection.

    It is within the logic of class confrontation that we must situate the rising wave of kidnapping and abduction throughout the length and breadth of the country. Although most severe in the east, it is a pan-Nigerian phenomenon. There are new kids on the block. The new kids are kidnappers. Anybody who has closely monitored the drama of the abduction of the four journalists and the capillary network of informants, rogue policemen, rogue security people, rogue traditional rulers and rogue state operatives must conclude that we are in totally uncharted territory. This is not to talk of the sharp clarity with which the kidnappers defined the objectives of their criminal enterprise.

    This criminal redistribution of criminally acquired wealth is anarchy on the march. But anarchy, we need to remind ourselves, is not the collapse of law and order but the collapse of lawlessness and disorder. Perhaps we need to summon G.F.W Hegel, the great German philosophical genius and theorist of the unhappy consciousness. Hegel was a great man but a frank racist to boot who believed that Africa and Africans never left the cradle of humankind; a dark jungle of uncultured and uncultivated savages.

    Hegel was forced to resolve the cruel existential dilemma of the unhappy consciousness in favour of the modern state and its implacable masters. According to him, the unhappy consciousness usually dissolves itself into hedonism and asceticism, and at a later stage in history into cynicism and scepticism. Throughout his life, Hegel was bedevilled by an unthinking glorification of the power and majesty of the nascent Prussian state. It was unchallenged and unchallengeable. “What is real is rational and what is rational is real”, Hegel famously proclaimed.

    Having resurrected the master-slave dialectic, Hegel did not know what to do with it. For him, it was unthinkable and unfeasible that the slave should trump and triumph over his master even when the master is abominably inferior to the slave. The unhappy consciousness courts disaster and the cult of futile martyrdom, all for the glory and magnification of something he calls the Absolute Spirit, which is a euphemism for God.

    It was left to Karl Marx, the great philosopher of radical consciousness, to stand Hegel’s logic on its head. Drawing deeply on Ludwig Feuerbach, another great German materialist philosopher, Marx avers that rather than being an ordinary drama of existence, the master-slave dialectic, or class struggle unto death, is the fulcrum on which history revolves and human society evolves.

    There is nothing like the absolute spirit but the disguised will of humanity. Rather than seeing paradise as an otherworldly pursuit, it is indeed a worldly possibility which must be struggled and fought for. For good measure, and as if he was heckling Hegel, Marx famously thundered: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it!!”

    It was as if Barabbas had anticipated Marx. Although often demonised as a violent thief and armed robber in Christian mythology, he was indeed a more stirring and intriguing historical figure. Barabbas was also a freedom fighter, having taken part in several uprisings against the local Roman tyranny. Echoes of our own kidnappers?

    In Mark 15:7, Barabbas was described as a member of the Jewish resistance who was in jail because he had taken part in a recent uprising. Many biblical scholars actually believed that he was an important figure in the local resistance. This might explain why the local crowd was rooting for him instead of Jesus. Barabbas might have been a thief, but he was also a local hero.

    The Roman authorities were not neutral arbiters. Through shrewd and strategic thinking, they might have come to the conclusion that the heroic thief was a lesser social risk than the man who called himself the messiah and who was beginning to acquire a huge following. If the strange man were to parlay and leverage his religious popularity in favour of political insurrection, that would surely be the end of Roman suzerainty in the land.

    There is an interesting twist at the end of this tale of Barabbas which has a peculiar resonance for contemporary Nigerian society and its kidnappers. Apart from Barabbas and Jesus sharing the same distinction as heroic rebel leaders, they also shared the same first name. Barabbas was actually Jesus Barabbas which was a very popular name around that place and period. In subsequent Christian literature, the name was deliberately expunged because the writers could not bear their religious hero share the same name as a common criminal.

    Like Barabbas who was a hero and a thief at the same time, kidnapping or hostage-taking combines heroism with perversion and criminality. Lest we forget, the original acts of hostage taking and kidnapping before it went industrial were isolated acts of considerable valour that were designed to draw attention to the parlous condition in the Niger Delta.

    But very soon, human prospecting became the equivalent of oil prospecting along the patterns of thievery and gangsterism. The militias originally trained to murder opponents and rig election now transformed into an equal opportunity employer of violence and forcible abduction in their own right.

    Why then are we so blest?  In Aramaic language, the name Barabbas, or bar Abba means the son of the father. The kidnappers are true sons of their fathers who have kidnapped the Nigerian state and appropriated resources belonging to a whole nation. The kidnappers seek not only to emulate their fathers but they also will like to immolate them. In this they appear to be a step ahead of their fathers in terms of criminal perversion. The son is truly the father of the man. The prospects are grim.

    In addition to all the measures to be put in place to eradicate the menace of kidnapping, greater surveillance, community policing, a better network of state informants, greater scrutiny of state bribery and money laundering, the resuscitation of the death penalty etc, please try this simple one. Let Barabbas stop stealing our money and let us see if his children will not stop kidnapping our people.

     

    (First published in July, 2010.)

  • Dancing with my father’s friend

    Dancing with my father’s friend

    It was the time of music and memorable melodies, of spellbinding lyrics from those earthy geniuses of the talking drum and percussionists of political palavers. There are certain images that are lodged in the consciousness forever, certain impressions that can never be erased from the human memory bank. Memories are made of this. When shall good times return to Nigeria?

    It is an act of filial affection. Snooper takes a walk today away from the sclerotic deadliness of contemporary Nigerian politics to give a rare glimpse, a historic cameo, of one of Nigeria’s most charismatic politicians and his father’s bosom friend and fallen comrade in political arms, the late Gbadamosi Sanusi Adelabu Adegoke, a.k.a Penkelemesi.

    Adelabu Adegoke died fifty years ago last week in a car crash around Ode Iremo aged forty two. For the gifted ironist and great Ibadan nationalist, it must have been the equivalent of an old Ibadan generalissimo falling in enemy terrain.  A scrawny kid barely a year in school, snooper recalls the day of memorable mayhem with graphic intensity. It is an even more pleasant surprise that one retains a vivid memory of the man with the cat-like features and an amazing feline grace.

    Spare of build and middling of height, Adelabu Adegoke was nevertheless a titan among men. He was a giant in every other respect: in prodigal memory, in precocious intellect, in stubborn idealism, in visionary imagination and contempt for mediocrity, and in his prodigious appetite and affinity for the fairer sex. There was more than a hint of the ancient Ibadan warrior in Penkelemesi.

    He was Nigeria’s first rock star politician. In his feckless courage and aptitude for stormy confrontations, Adelabu Adegoke often betrayed the nobility of the naïve genius. This freewheeling and swashbuckling devilry of the happy warrior was to serve him very poorly in the treacherous terrain of pre-independence politics.

    Time after time, he was outgunned and out-foxed by more coolly calculating and Machiavellian scoundrels. But he retained his buoyancy of outlook; his vibrancy of intellect and optimism of granite will till the bitter end.

    Had he lived, and given his contempt for the norms of the bread and butter politician, it would have been interesting to see how he would pitch his tent in the great Awolowo-Akintola tango, or how he would view the antics of A.M.A Akinloye, his old comrade, who was to make a one hundred and eighty degree somersault back to right wing base.  Adelabu Adegoke came upon the political scene like a meteor and expired with the dazzling brilliance of a meteor.

    When beggars die, there are no comets seen but the heavens themselves blaze forth at the death of princes, observes the immortal William Shakespeare. The western Nigeria heavens did blaze forth on the death of Adelabu. Originating from beggarly and penurious circumstances, Adelabu was to overcome the straitened provenance of birth to become a shining star. Despite being born poor, he was a natural prince among men, combining an aristocratic hauteur with populist hell-raising.

    A plutocrat of plural possibilities, what galled him most was unearned merit and distinction and as the colonialists were to find out this royal rebel could be rude and rowdy with superiors while being cosy and conciliatory with subordinates. Adelabu was one hell of a political Robin Hood.

    But despite his outstanding qualities as a politician, despite his warmth, his humanity and spontaneous vitality, it is as a dancer of genius that snooper remembers the great man. Nothing can be more electrifying than the political dance. It is a carnival of the possessed, an orgiastic chaos brimming with elemental possibilities and permutations, redolent of collective orgasm. With his lean wiry frame, eel-like body dynamics and explosive foot-works, Adelabu was a star dancer. He was what the Yoruba will call “akuruyejo” or the small one who is a lovely dancer.

    It was a dull overcast afternoon. The first rains of the year came during the night turning the afternoon into a cool, lethargic affair in the small sleepy town. It was Adelabu’s bosom friend who picked his distinct scent from the distant echo of light music.

    “Ah Adelabu ti nbo (Adelabu is coming)”, father announced to no one in particular as a grudging grin lit up his stern comely features. The entire household erupted in spontaneous celebration. The women began chanting Adelabu’s praise with their husband staring at his assorted collection as if they were specimen from the zoo freshly liberated. Unlike his bosom friend, snooper pere was a man of amazing self-restraint. The unlettered damsels saw this as a rare opportunity as they crooned:

    Adelabu, Akande iji

         Igi jegede ti d’ana ru

          A nle bo lehin, o nl’ara iwaju

           Ekun oko Ayoka omo kumo.

    This was Adelabu’s usual gambit, his signature tune and part of his huge repertoire of political tricks. He would pack his car at a distant and then proceed on foot in a carnivalesque procession. Famously, he once abandoned his official car at Molete and then headed home on foot asking the good people of Ibadan to take possession of their property. The people responded with joyous lyrics.

    Adelabu ma kowo wa na

    Igunnu loni tapa, tapa loni Igunnu

    Ma kowo wa na.

    By the time Adelabu’s entourage reached the vicinity of our household, it had been transformed into a huge crowd of dancers and drummers, a colourful assortment of rural merrymakers, an agrarian tapestry of colour and chaos. Snooper and his various mothers joined the suburban pageantry to the delight and approval of the crowd. The prince of charismatic confusion was swinging and digging with regal abandon even as he winked devilishly at the more unprintable of the lyrics.

    Meanwhile Ayan, the lead drummer, a rogue musical genius of inventive profanity, had worked himself into a state of delirious frenzy, frothing at the corner of the mouth as he dished out tons of provocative malediction against political enemies. For the moment, he concentrated his attention on the palm tree, the symbol of the rival Action Group.

    Inu Igbo l’ope ngbe

     A ki kole adete s’igboro

      Inu Igbo l’ope ngbe.

    And later:

    B’a o r’epo mo a of’ori s’obe

       Ope nikan ko laiye.

    By the time the procession reached our doorsteps, Ayan had raised the stakes, taking a vicious swing at Awolowo himself. By now, he had about him the look of a deranged hyena even as his talking drum pulsated with malice and mischief.

    Bowo ba ba Awolowo yi yan ni e yan

    Kale ro njeba lola

    Bowo ba ba Awolowo yi yan ni e yan

    By this time, the procession had reached its destination which was our doorstep. The crowd puller had to be separated from the crowd. It was a rowdy separation. Adelabu disappeared  into the bowels of the house to strategise with his friend and comrade in arms. The curtains fell on a great man forever. Six months later, Adelabu died in a car crash. Nigeria had lost one of its most illustrious sons.

    Till date, snooper has continued to ponder how Adelabu would have dealt with the Awolowo phenomenon, particularly when it reached its full crushing momentum of mass mobilisation. Perhaps the pragmatic and more politically astute Ibadan politician would have surprised the ponderous Ikenne lawyer on the homeward stretch, cutting a deal that Awolowo would never have contemplated and saving his people from the long scourge of misbegotten federalism.

    It is unlikely that Adelabu would have cut a deal with Awo. While Awolowo viewed Adelabu with wary curiosity, Adelabu viewed Awolowo with brash intellectual contempt dismissing him as an upstart. Where was Awolowo when he Adelabu was performing those academic miracles at Government College, Ibadan, Adelabu would have rued to himself.

    But while Awolowo was a great political artist, Adelabu was a great artist in politics. The great artist in politics weaves powerful tapestries in the collective memory and imagination leaving behind only glimpses of his tortured and alienated genius. It is the great political artist with great stamina and stability who builds enduring empires. Fifty years on, yours sincerely remembers dancing with his father’s friend.

  • Akin Ambode, a nice chap finishes first

    Snooper has been watching and following the intrigue-soaked, fiendishly quicksilver political milieu of Lagos with quiet animation. In the Fourth Republic, Lagos has gradually replaced Ibadan as the epicentre of progressive politics. It is the nerve centre and engine room of the transformational politics that has taken the old west and now the rest of Nigeria by storm. Have political brains and will travel. As the column never tires of positing, the artillery of knowledge is superior to knowledge of artillery.

    But all over the world and particularly in post-colonial societies, progressive clans are a fractious troublous lot, quarrelling openly and quietly making up behind the scene even as the machine constantly purges itself of unworthy accretions. It is in the nature of radical organizations seeking changes to be riddled with even more violent contradictions than the status quo they seek to supplant.

    Early in life, snooper developed a mantra which often sees him through political turbulence. It is that no matter what happens, the party is supreme. You may quarrel viciously and violently before decisions are taken, but once they are taken you have to abide by them. This mantra was taken from an old western political warhorse whose one-liner retort to internal protest was: (Wo, parti o gbodo fo!) Look, the party must not break up, no matter what!

    This is why it is meet to congratulate the Lagos state governor Akin Ambode over his sweet victory at the electoral tribunal. Now that the electoral hurdle has been scaled, it is time for the calm and methodical fellow to unfurl his bag of surprises for Lagosians.  Humane, polished, cultured, sincerely solicitous of other people’s wellbeing, and impeccably well-mannered  , Ambode is quite a revelation in the coliseum of political roughnecks.

    In the course of the last electioneering campaign, snooper sat down alone to drill the then gubernatorial aspirant and found his logical and intellectual grasp of issues, political, economic and even cultural, a tad short of prodigious. His answers were extensively well-researched and deeply thought out, shorn of pomp and pomposity. His quiet unassuming mien belies a ruthless streak which does not take hostages when sufficiently roused. Well-educated, well-travelled and very cosmopolitan in outlook, Ambode should take Lagos state to the next level after the labours of earlier avatars.

    Here is wishing the governor a successful tenure. Good guys also finish first.

  • Missing persons index: mum is the word from a mumu

    And whilst we are still on the subject of the hordes of displaced political refugees flocking the highway of politics, it is meet to file a missing person report from another department. It would seem that our man, the Kirikiri canal columnist, has committed hara-kiri. Snooper has been waiting in vain for his response to the electoral triumph of General Mohammadu Buhari, the man he claimed to be simply unelectable and Senator Bola Tinubu, the one he excoriated so callously and unremittingly.

    A dark cloud has since enveloped his even darker visage. While the dyspeptic diatribe lasted, it was a classic case of the column as unrelenting calumny and shameless hate sermons. Snooper was happy to watch from the sideline knowing that it will all end in a fiasco. Only in the annals of psychotics can a man who claims to be a pastor be so consumed by hatred and malice towards fellow mortals no matter the opposition to their politics and person.

    Yet a cursory glance at this mishmash of misanthropy reveals nothing but jejune emoting and the sophomoric canards of a mind so superficial, so incapable of analytic rigour, that a robust engagement is out of the question. You cannot argue with unarguable lunacy. For those who know their history, this is not the first time the fellow’s hate platform would collapse under the weight of its own troubled contradictions. The first time around, he disappeared for a long spell. Here is hoping that this time around, the spell will be much longer.

  • The corrosive art of political insult

    Just when snooper was beginning to lament the dearth or possible death of the great art of political insult, things have begun to shape up.  The presidential slugfest is beginning to live up to the billing. The happy days of great political insults may be here with us again. A rogue professor from the University of Lamurudu has famously described the presidential candidate of the APC in very uncomplimentary terms. Whereupon an irate Dr Usman  sniffily noted that he had googled up the said professor and nothing was coming up.

    Nothing ? Haba, doctor, not even a letter to the editor as my egbon, Omotoye Olorode, would quip in the course of a bust up in those days with another professorial wannabe?  Snooper wishes to inform  the doctor that the political economy of scholarship in Nigeria is no longer Google-compliant. A child who says his parents are remiss in poverty has a lifetime to prove his own worth.

    However it is in the corrosive exchange between Musliu Obanikoro and Commodore Bode George that political insult inches towards a literary summit. George took Obanikoro to the cleaners noting that “Lagos has moved on, far beyond the primitive wretchedness of little ill-bred hooligans”. In a swift sucker punch, Obanikoro noted that “the post-traumatic stress disorder that comes with a time in jail would take more than just an unholy alliance with a pharmacist to heal.” Phew!!!!

    All of which must remind one of an exchange in the ancient Roman Senate. After repeatedly badgering and tormenting a new senator for being a veterinary doctor, one of his accusers rounded on him.

    “Sir, we learnt that you cure animals?” the man crowed sniffily.

    “And sir, are you ill?” the vet growled. End of conversation.

  • Prospects in adversity

    Prospects in adversity

    IT never rains but pours, as they say. This past week, one cannot but weep for Mother Nigeria. Snooper does not normally engage in silly sentiments but the sight of a potentially great nation being battered and buffeted from all sides by increasingly violent storms cannot but evoke pity and passion. It is like watching the ruined hulk of a once magnificent heavyweight boxer being tossed and trussed around the ring like an expired paperweight.

    No one can be sure which one of the savage blows will prove fatal. But there can be no doubt that something is about to give.  Even for a lion-hearted nation that has seen off many adversities the combination of spiritual, political, economic and military disasters might prove a bridge too far. When you combine needless political turmoil, a rampart and remorseless religious uprising, the spiritual disorientation of a whole society with looming economic collapse, you have a perfect storm unfurling.

    In nautical terms, a perfect storm occurs when a rare confluence of events leads to a dramatic worsening of a situation. In political terms, a perfect storm occurs when a rare convergence of different situations leads to a drastic worsening of circumstances. In the same week that Jonathan shot himself in the foot by ordering an invasion of the National Assembly, the Boko Haram insurgents almost added a state capital to their prized possessions.

    As if these national tribulations were not enough, a major economic crisis signposted by dwindling petroleum revenues led to a summary devaluation of the naira.  Nigerian officials have tried to put a bold face to this looming economic meltdown by insisting that our reserves should see us through. Like economic Rip van Winkles, they seem incapable of grasping the magnitude of the unfolding drama.

    Dwindling revenues would lead to a drastic scaling down of capital projects; a worsening balance of state obligations and further loss of human capital. The bloated and bogus thirty-six state structure will become so severely cash-strapped in a matter of months that paying salaries will become a major miracle. All the indices point to an economic implosion. The next few months will be tense and fraught indeed.

    One major crisis is often enough for any nation. But for a nation to be simultaneously confronted by severe crises in the most critical segments of human governance is beyond the normal order of things. On the face of it, it may look as if Nigeria is a victim of a monstrous national and international conspiracy to bring it to heel. The behavior of some of our neighbours appears very suspicious. Our old western patrons and partners appear to have given up completely on the nation as a viable project.

    Yet on closer scrutiny and deeper observation, we are actually the architects of our own misfortunes. In order to ensure the sustenance of civilisation and the survival of the human species, nature often places a curse on its bounties. We must not be content with consuming them as we find them. We must add value to them through labour and ceaseless imagination. Without this fundamental law of nature, there would have been no civilisation and humankind would have remained stranded at the hunter-gatherer stage of existence. The wielded scythe speaks its own poetry and every human society that has excelled is a product of industry and poetic imagination.

    As a result of an unproductive political elite stuck at the feral level of human existence with its impulse for immediate game-sharing so reminiscent of primitive hunting packs, we have allowed oil to become a curse on the nation. In almost 60 years of oil prospecting in the nation, we have not added any value to the black gold, beyond pocketing its proceeds and indulging in outlandish consumption of foreign goods.

    This monocultural nature of our economy has completely distorted our growth and development and now threatens to swamp everything in an oily sludge. Beyond empowering only a few and leaving the rest to wallow in poverty and biblical misery, those who claim to be the rightful owners of the oil wells have not done much better than those they traditionally dismiss as parasites and leeches. Irrespective of ethnic extraction, the Nigerian political elite is cut from the same societal loins.

    Many other societies have learnt their lessons the hard way. In the sixteenth century, gold from the Potosi mines of South America brought ruinous inflation to metropolitan Spain. The country went on a long spiral of economic and political dysfunction in which it was humiliated in turn by Holland, its former colony, England and then America which stripped it of its last illusions as a global power. It has taken four centuries, several political upheavals and a momentous civil war for the land of matadors to recover its bearing.

    But we live in a different global order. As Nigeria begins to foam in blood from all fronts, it should also be clear that the international community out of enlightened self interest will not allow its misery to be prolonged or protracted. If the Boko Haram insurgency represents the rogue Islamic initiative, the unfolding oil war between America and the Saudi kingdom may yet turn out to be some final solution. Between them, Jonathan’s frantic assaults on national institutions serve as the local catalyst.

    With such a distinguished list of potential terminators on the queue, Nigeria will be hard pressed to survive on a day to day basis. If we are lucky, it may all end in the remarkable recombination and reconstitution of the Nigerian nation. If not a conglomeration of warlord enclaves beckons. But the point to note is that there is opportunity in crisis and possibilities in utter adversity.

    Given the events of the past few weeks, a consensus is beginning to emerge that the nation has reached a historic watershed and it cannot continue along this ruinous path. Hitherto, it has been a dialogue of the deaf between two seemingly immovable ethnic ramparts without any possibility of a pan-Nigerian resolution or a peaceful post-Nigerian dispersal of the tribes. There are those who believe that no matter the incompetence and skittish nature of the Jonathan administration, it must continue to rule for the foreseeable future because there are other sections  that have also serially misruled the nation and for much longer too. The patent does not belong to the husband of Patience. Neither does the Nigerian patient.

    On the other hand, there are those who passionately hold the view that if Jonathan is not out of Aso Rock and the presidential mansion before or after the next elections , then we can as well forget about Nigeria as a corporeal entity. For this band, Nigeria might as well disappear since any further extension of Jonathan’s tenure will spell doom and eventful ruination politically and economically for the old North, its teeming masses and the rump of its feudal aristocracy.  It was as if Nigeria was sleepwalking to a self-fulfilling prophecy. No country has been known to survive an election fuelled by such polarisations.

    The granite disavowals are gradually yielding to pragmatic realities. The search for the Nigerian saviour or a group of people who will redeem the nation from its current morass has resumed in earnest. The parties are not perfect, and going forward the elections will not be perfect. But in order to genuinely commence the structural re-engineering that Nigeria so badly needs at this momentous stage of its existence, we need a democratic mechanism for change or continuity as the case may be which will be acceptable to majority of Nigerians.

    In the past two weeks, one has come across a few people from the South South and Ijaw nation willing to question Jonathan’s eligibility for another term based purely on performance in office. This is just as it should be. In the dialectic of human development, all that is solid often melts into thin air. By the same token, the gradual dilution and domestication of the old CPC by the ACN and UPGA crowds means that this time around the contest cannot be framed as a death duel between the messiah and the militant. Many things have happened since 2011.

    Of course in a multi-national post-colonial polity, elections are never the ideal panacea for the resolution of national conflicts. As this column has repeatedly argued, elections may actually exacerbate the national question. But having sabotaged the outcome of its own conference ab initio, free and fair elections remain the best referendum for the Jonathan era and the way forward in the short median. In any case, with the current foul mood in the National Assembly and the whispers of impeachment, it is no longer possible to push through any constitutional panel-beating through that august body.

    So let the contending parties come out with their manifestoes, stating clearly how to end the Boko Haram menace and how to go about the depetrolisation of the Nigerian economy. Let us have a real presidential debate. Going forward, the Buhari group may find their political consorting with the dominant political tendency in the South West at once profoundly liberating and modulating.

    Conversely  as they break out of their regional cocoons, the ACN folks may also find it profoundly liberating and modulating to discover that the whole notion of an ideologically and hence politically monolith west is a self-sustaining myth requiring constant propitiation. Out of the ugly clouds of destruction and disintegration, there may yet be some silver lining in the horizon.

  • Caveat emptor……

    Even in deep autumn, the human mind is a deep spring of eternal hope and possibilities. Some of these hopes may turn out to be quite delusional. But that is neither here nor there. It is impossible to get through life without a few illusions. Life itself may yet turn out to be a grand illusion. But you must get on with it, whether you like it or not.

    It is good to be back to these labours. Like an ageing warrior, snooper often enjoys the din of contention; the agonistic rumble of the intellectual coliseum; the rude and irreverent jabs of mercenary commentators who have found ungainly employment on the internet. While there are blue and black collar jobs, the internet has now introduced the phenomenon of the yellow collar work force. Such are the contradictions of global capitalism.

    It is meet, then, to report once again that the reports about the death of the column are widely exaggerated. Despite a well-advertised and well-displayed announcement of a richly deserved rest, the rumour mill still went into overdrive gear. Both column and columnist were reported to have folded up, to employ K.O Mbadiwe’s famous fatwa against an offending newspaper and its editor. One report was said to have sighted Snooper in purgatory observing miserable penance.

    Among these unfounded rumours, Snooper’s favourite was the one which expansively noted that yours sincerely has sneaked out of both The Nation and the nation after a severe power struggle, with his tail between his legs and in fear of dear life. Oh dear!!! When Snooper complained to a friend, he shot back that given the engrossing turn of phrase, the fellow must be one of Snooper’s own boys. He was right.

    Snooper solemnly apologises for inflicting some of these chaps on the national psyche. You can never predict how some of these things will turn out. When you are training intellectual rottweilers, you never know when one of them will turn round to bite you in gratitude. Some of these boys, having returned from the phoney Jonathan Conference empty-handed but with their pockets fully loaded, have taken up calumny as intellectual sports.

    Meanwhile, Jonathan, a master of political ambush and crafty deception, has moved on to the real game in town, leaving them in the lurch. If they care to know, Snooper is acquainted with a veteran tailor in Agege who specialises in the radical restructuring of incontinent pockets. In local parlance, it is known as a double stitch up. Let’s meet at the engagingly named Pen Cinema around Orile.

    So many things happened while the column was away. As they say, a week is a long time in both local and global politics. This past week, the brave and heroic people of Burkina Faso finally saw off their veteran tyrant, the execrable Blaise Compaore,  a.k.a “ Beau Blaise”.

    After his dismissal, the French-powered convoy was thought to be heading for the famous Po Garrison from whence in 1983 Compaore led his famous match on Ouagadougou  to liberate his bosom friend, Thomas Sankara,  from state detention. But the convoy made a detour and headed for Ivory Coast . A drawn , dazed and disoriented  Compaore was later seen arriving at a plush hotel in the Ivorian capital as the curtain drew on his inglorious epoch.

    In Nigeria, Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle, the gifted Civil War commander, passed on. Coming on the heels of his demise in saddening circumstances was the eightieth birthday celebration of his former Commander in Chief, General Yakubu Gowon. Gowon was the federal victor in the Nigerian civil war. But the clinking of champagne glasses had hardly subsided when the Boko Haram insurgents captured Mubi, the second city of Adamawa state and the economic nerve centre of the north east. Forty seven years after the commencement of the first civil war, a considerable swathe of the nation is now occupied by another rebel army.

    Each of these momentous occurrences merits a separate column, and they shall be so treated in the coming weeks. Each of the events may appear vastly dissimilar to each other, but they are all profoundly related in a dialectical manner of speaking. They speak to the paradoxes and trajectory of political tyranny in post-colonial Africa and to the final working out of the contradictions of military messianism on the continent. But it is the developments in Burkina Faso that merit primacy of attention for the light they beam on a momentous epoch of traumatic transition for the continent.

  • …..And a short goodbye from Snooper

    Dear readers, it is time once again to say a short goodbye to our numerous fans and the critical admirers of this column. Since its debut in January 2007, this column has gone on leave only once. It has been almost eight years of continuous and killing exertions. It is now time to take a proper rest. After eight years of hammering away before the lucent screen , even the keyboard is beginning to play poker. There are times when you type in the last letter and then fall asleep on the keyboard only to find that the last letter had multiplied into eight screen pages of strange hieroglyphics which only the ancient Egyptians can decode. It is the Nubian’s nunc dimittis.

    The columnist thanks the numerous readers who have kept him on his toes, particularly our old friends and colleagues in the global academy and the internet samurai who also occasionally come to blows among themselves. We may not always agree on the state of the nation or the way forward, but it has been one hell of an experience discovering how many people still care about the fate of this gifted country.   May their tribe multiply. Bye for now.

  • Okon submits application for paternity leave

    It has been raining cats and dogs in Lagos. The sky looks like a bereaved old woman who has wept herself into a wrinkled sunken mass. Whether this is a divine metaphor for the state of the nation or some apocalyptic forewarning, Snooper cannot say. Nature can also be profligate in its bounties. The rains are part of some ancient fertility rites, a boon for baby boomers, in  a manner of speaking.

    But you can trust the indefatigable Okon to cotton in on the act. On Saturday morning, instead of preparing early breakfast, the rogue Romeo barged in with a bulging file brimming with dog-eared receipts and assorted counterfeit bills. Before one could ask what he was up to, the crazy chap erupted.

    “Oga, since dem Fashola people don see reason, I wan apply for dem multiple paternity leave. I get dem four women who dey carry pikin for Okon”, the mad boy snorted.

    “Meaning what?” Snooper snapped.

    “Na dem papa born dem and na me give dem belle”, Okon retorted with a fiendish grin of self-satisfaction.

    “Okon, go away, you are a fool. The law recognises only monogamy”, snooper explained, suppressing his mirth.

    “Oga dat one na burukutu law. I no dey do dem mahogany. Mahogany na hard wood. Okon dey fire only dem rubber bullet.” Okon sneered.

    “But still, four women in a row!! Okon, since when have you become a baby factory?” snooper asked in jest.

    “Ah oga, dat one I sabi well well”, Okon began with a satanic wink, “he get time like dat when I dey do night shift for dem baby factory for Oko Oba. One night dem come bring eleven girls from Abakaliki like dat and dem say make man start work. As I come dey drink paraga for manpower, dem mad ibo girl come seize dem bottle and come hammer Okon him head. Naim I come pick race like dem antelope for Itigidi. Dem ibo crooks still dey owe me for overtime, but I no fit go near dem place lailai”.

    “Case closed”, snooper crowed with a measure of satisfaction.

    “Ha, oga I hope dis dem paternity thin no be dem offside trap. You know dem Fashola boy na good footballer.”, Oko noted fearfully.

    “Why?” snooper demanded.

    “Becos dem never give me dem Certificate of Occupation for Shikira. I don waka sotey for Alausa, and na so so promise. If only I fit take dem Abakaliki girls there make dem teach dem sense”, Okon lamented. On that note, snooper quietly pushed out the crazy boy.