Elite politics, particularly in postcolonial Africa, is usually a complex and complicated affair. It is futile and foolish to judge what is actually going on by its surface manifestations. In the cloak and dagger world of African realpolitik, what is shaping up as a lethal sledgehammer may eventually end as a ritualised gesture of obeisance and capitulation. But there are times when the signals of trouble and the smoke of imminent combustion are too strong to be ignored.
Make no mistake about this. The house of Oduduwa is on the boil. There is much commotion and caterwauling in the political space. The presidential sweepstakes has been reduced to an outlandish bazaar with a plethora of rival claimants shadow duelling before the main tournament. Even in traditional societies, the contest for the royal stool is usually marked by more dignity and decorum.
In a widely referenced Afenifere Inaugural Lecture held on March 15, 2004, this writer posed the troubling question: Why is it that after each successful mobilization of the Yoruba people by progressive forces, the wheels tend to come off the mobilising vehicle? Is this a reflection of a flaw in Yoruba historical and sociological conditioning as a result of a contradictory pull of the forces of political, economic and spiritual modernity?
Does it mean that the progressive tendency in Yorubaland cannot manage success? Are the lure of office and the spoils of victory usually too strong for the centre to hold? Or does it mean that despite all pretensions and appearances to the contrary, the progressive forces are not really different from the conservative phalanx they seek to supplant by bruising propaganda and intellectual razzmatazz?
It is to be noted that not even Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s much lionized Action Group was exempt from this political schizophrenia. Confronted by the conundrum of postcolonial modernity and its associated pathologies, the Action Group simply unravelled into its royalist, conservative and progressive components with Awolowo taking a sharp lurch to the left while Akintola and associates rallied the conservative pragmatic banner. It ended in disaster.
The same political drama came to the fore, or was about to during the Second Republic. The UPN was only saved by the bell of military intervention. The creaking noise of imminent disintegration could already be picked off by the discerning. Rumours were rife of a certain Awolowo arch-loyalist who was being lured away from the group by the wily feudal powerbrokers on the grounds of proven competence and correct religious affiliation.
After Abiola’s famous presidential victory, the same scenario repeated itself. While a section of the progressive forces that rallied to ensure Abiola’s victory decided to collaborate with the military/feudal complex, the true progressive forces were having none of that. They subsequently made life impossible for the military junta.
But after the comprehensive victory of progressive forces in the old west following the retreat of the military to the barracks in 1999, the surviving progressive component was rocked by a series of crises which led to the disintegration of their party with generous assistance from the federal authorities led by a Yoruba son. Chief Bola Ige was to lose his life in the fractious disputations and bitter infighting.
Now in 2022, we have arrived at a similar conjuncture. The unappeasable demon of Yoruba political self-annihilation has returned to demand its ritual appeasement once again. A people globally acknowledged for their culture and political sophistication have once again arrived at a point where the periodic tiff among their political elite has now mutated to a situation of civil war among the dominant progressive elite. And even after they have come to power at the centre for the first time in their history?
Is the historic handshake across the northern Niger now turning into a bone-crushing anaconda embrace? The master-puppeteers are laughing hysterically behind the wall of contrived silence. But it is going to be a very short laugh indeed. The merchant of expired merchandise has finally arrived at the supermarket of prohibited commodity. Those who believed that Nigeria’s salvation lies in a historic partnership of contrasting visions of society have been given a brutal short shrift.
The post-military Fourth Republic has brought out the worst in our political class. As this column never tires of reiterating, the spate of party crisscrossing and shameless defections is an indication of politics totally devoid of ideology or any ideals. It reminds one of Robert Musil’s famous novel, The Man Without qualities, a zombie-like cretin given to the pursuit of personal pleasures at the expense of societal wellbeing.
In the jungle of primitive political impulses, the organising principle is sheer lack of principles and the ruling authority is disordered reality. There is no paddy for jungle as they say. In this African political leprosarium, all fellow feelings of empathy and compassion are completely denuded. In the ethical wasteland, how anybody expects another person to be loyal to him is a matter of intellectual puzzlement.
But let us get this clear. After this alliance, the dominant Yoruba group will return to base more polarized and bitterly divided than at any point in the last seventy years. The infighting is likely to be more vicious because some of the emergent political warlords have acquired the means and capacity to keep and sustain private militias. The social media is already deeply embedded.
If it is of any comfort, however, it can be said that the north itself has not fared any better with the region politically, spiritually and economically prostrate and its elite bitterly factionalized, its vast landscape blitzed beyond recognition even as it continues to hold off rival claimants to the throne. The ethnic nationality question is embedded in the National Question. One cannot be resolved without the other.
In the past one week, this columnist has been inundated with requests by readers asking him to comment on the current political infighting and the jostling for the presidential ticket among the Yoruba political elite. A most concerned clergyman friend and great admirer informed the columnist that he was eagerly awaiting his judicious intervention.
These requests are made based on the belief that yours sincerely has his ears close to the ground in the Yoruba political terra firma or that one is close to the source of power. However, it must be noted that the role of the columnist is different from the role of the politically engaged. One must never be confused or conflated with the other. For the columnist comments are free as long as facts are sacred. But for the strategically savvy reticence is often of superior eloquence than drooling flippancy and mere verbal incontinence.
Of the virtues that separate humanity from the lower species, honour and loyalty to friendship occupy the apex position. This writer holds very dear the sacred principle of fidelity to friendship no matter the circumstances and no matter the abhorrent behaviour of the other party. What is important is to hold on to your personal values and stick to the standards you have established.
To stab a friend in the back in his hour of need is one of the most sacrilegious acts humans are capable of. But there are times when the code of honour comes into violent conflict with the code of loyalty to personal friendship, particularly where the fate of an important component of the Black race is concerned.
For example, every true Black intellectual of this perilous age must fight on the side of the people and pitch for progressive emancipatory politics. Where a political party promises progressive policies only to jettison such policies on the first crow of the cock, such a party must be severely sanctioned and considered unworthy of public trust.
But to sanction does not mean to abandon the original progressive platform, particularly in the absence of a viable Third Force and in a situation where the clear alternative is a pack of unprincipled and obviously unrepentant political jackals eager to resume the freeloading and feeding frenzy where they signed off.
Readers of this column must attest to the fact that in the past seven years, it has never hidden its disaffection and radical dissatisfaction with the policy somersaults of the ruling party and the conduct of its apex leadership, irrespective of their ethnic origin, creed or religion. But group cohesion and the collective viability of a people must not be sacrificed at the altar of hegemonic pranks.
This is why all the gladiators must be brought to a negotiating table where a honourable deal can be hammered out. No one can come out a triumphant winner in the looming fratricidal bloodletting. The presumptive winner will be so badly weakened and compromised by the consuming contention that he will end up a Quisling to the cause of an emancipated Nigeria or a jaded overall loser that will be brought back home in a political body bag.
In the current delirium of treachery and the quicksand of personal perfidy, all the loose talks of betrayal will evaporate, all the frenzied and fanciful name calling will disappear, only to be replaced by the betrayal of a people and all the sufferings and trauma that have marked the struggle for the progressive emancipation of the Nigerian people from the clutches of medieval tyranny and a retrogressive worldview whose depredations and devastation of modern Nigeria can no longer be hidden from public view.
Unless this is the desired outcome, unless they have been reactionary moles all along in the service of the historic persecutors of their own people, this is the time for the principal combatants to sheath their swords and allow calm sober reasoning to supersede irrational sabre-rattling.
Unfortunately, one suspects that the horse might have bolted from the stable. It is impossible to adjudicate in a political dispute fought without higher principles and without any visionary template for the urgent transformation of a fallen nation. With the hitherto progressive components going in different directions in the pursuit of irreconcilable ambitions, there is likely to be a complete mutual evisceration before any reconfiguration of a new order can take place.
In the light of this overwhelming tragedy, can we still deny that the historic collaboration between the north and the west of the nation was a political error of unimaginable magnitude? This is a poser of such dialectical density that it cannot be answered in a simple yes or no format. The historic collaboration which resulted in the victory of the APC at the centre is not the result of a pan-Nigerian concert of all the contending power blocs.
Even if it is driven by consuming personal ambition, it is a product of a historic consensus between factions of the hegemonic power formations in the nation. It can be argued that in a multi-ethnic country fissured by various divisions such amity of all contending blocs is a political impossibility without a structured elite consensus.
The signal lesson to be learnt from all this is that forging a workable and viable nation from the colonial bedlam we have inherited is more important than consummating power alliances based on exclusion and marginalization. The excluders will also be excluded eventually. In postcolonial nations, elections and electoral victories cannot be regarded as prime instruments of nation-growing.
History will be measured in its praise of the driving proponents behind the alliance to the extent that it tried to break the historic deadlock between contending power-formations. As such, it is an imperfect harbinger of a more visionary reconstruction of the Nigerian political space based on inclusivity and the de-marginalisation of the constituent units.
This must come very soon if Nigeria were not to dissolve into unwieldy components. The glaring failures of the past seven years show just how dire the situation has become and the fact that Nigeria can no longer be sustained along the old unitary formula. General Buhari in all probability is the last ruler of old Nigeria.