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Chidi Amuta

  • Xi Jingping in Calabar – Chidi Amuta

    Xi Jingping in Calabar – Chidi Amuta

    Chidi Amuta

     

    Chinese leader, Xi Jiping, wears the face of the looming age of China in world affairs. Inscrutable but amiable in a rather mechanical way, Xi is a man with a huge world historic mission but few words. Under his leadership, the coming of the age of China has acquired greater tractionand urgency than ever. But as in Xi’s facial expression, we have no way of knowing everything the Chinese are thinking about the future of the world. They think in Mandarin and communicate directives to 1.4 million citizens. I suspect they only translate 25% of what they want the world to know and believe into English and other languages. Ordinarily, then, the Chinese are an inherently quiescent people, a land of everyman as a stoic Confucian contemplative philosopher.

     

    On the contrary, the Americans think and talk too much in English with the result that nearly everybody can second guess their next set of moves. It is America’s rowdy politics and talkative diplomacy that is drawing out the Chinese to occasionally say some of what they are doing if only to respond to some of the outrageous claims and charges tumbling out of Washington daily. This contrasting approach is likely to dominate big power relations in the decades ahead.

     

    All the same, feverish rehearsals for a prolonged contest of global pre-eminent between the United States and China are gathering steam in many spheres. The Chinese are literally foraging in unusual backyards for strategic footholds in anticipation of a confrontation that is foretold but may never take place. In the Asia Pacific, China has staked an unmistakable claim on what it considers its immediate sphere of influence and interest. It is building navel and air bases in the South China Sea. It has served notice to nations like the Philippines that its presence and interests can no longer be ignored. It has flexed its muscles in its border areas with India while serving notice to Australia, New Zealand and Japan that it intends to contest the influence of the West, especially the united States, in the areas that matter to China’s long term interests.

     

    In Africa, the Chinese have already established a full scale naval base in Djibouti under the understandable pretext of contributing to the safety of the troubled waters in the Gulf of Aden, a major shipping gateway long troubled by Somali pirates. It was hard to fault their logic as the Djibouti facility came in handy when Libya unraveled and the Chinese rapidly evacuated thousands of Chinese workers from Libya.

     

    For Nigeria and West Africa, however, a concerning development with long term consequences has just taken place. United States intelligence reports as recently confirmed by The Wall Street Journal and subsequently echoed and analyzed by The Economist to the effect that the Chinese have just completed the construction of a deep sea naval port facility in Bata, Equatorial Guinea.

     

    This is China’s first effective foothold in the Atlantic. It is a development that has irked Washington making it send a high level emissary In turn, it has sent a high level emissary to caution the authorities in the tiny African country on the dangers of facilitating China’s global ambitions. In addition to Equatorial Guinea, the Chinese are said to have their eyes on the ports of Angola, Sao Tome and Principe and others. Its strategy is either to have outright naval bases or friendly port access in some of these places. China is already involved in the construction or development of a number of port facilities in Africa including Lagos.

     

    In an April, 2021 assessment presented to the US Senate, General Stephen Townsend, Commander of US Africa Command, asserted that ‘China’s most significant threat …would be a militarily useful navel facility on the Atlantic coast of Africa. (That means) a port where they can rearm with munitions and repair naval vessels.” This is precisely what may have been achieved with the facility at Bata in Equatorial Guinea. Washington was sufficiently worried about the development to send Jon Finer, its deputy national security adviser on a mission to the tiny republic to register the unease of Washington with the development.

     

    What is significant for Nigeria with this development is first the sheer physical proximity of the Chinese military presence. Malabo is a mere 144 kilometers away from Calabar, 225 kilometers from Port Harcourt and a little over 600 kilometers from Lagos. These distances are immaterial in today’s world of virtual proximity of everywhere from everywhere. What is important is Nigeria’s strategic interest and stake in the Gulf of Guinea and the sensitive positioning of Equatorial Guinea in that mix.

     

    Of course, it is well within the sovereign prerogative of Equatorial Guinea to enter into any arrangements with any other country to locate whatever facilities it considers in its national interest. As they have tended to do in recent times, the Chinese are free to seek out whatever African dictatorships it can find and cajole or bride them into whatever agreement that serves its interest. On the surface, both China and Equatorial Guinea may have acted within their rights under international law in the location of the naval facility at Bata. But as is common with all such sensitive strategic decisions, there is nothing in the legitimacy of this action that should deter other nations that are likely to be adversely affected by the action from acting in defense of their own national interests. If Equatorial Guinea ever becomes a theatre for the drama of competing national interests between China and the United States, Nigeria may not be a disinterested bystander.

     

    On their part, the Chinese in choosing Equatorial Guinea acted well within a predictable model of political behaviour. Equatorial Guinea offers an ideal partner, the type of African state that the Chinese would opt to deal with. The country is an autocracy presided over by a ruthless 79 –year old with iron fist since 1979. President Teodora Obiang Nguema Mbasogo is one of Africa’s longest ruling leaders. The government in which his son is also the Vice President is a famously corrupt family autocracy. Everything ranging from the oil industry, telecommunications and retail trade are controlled by either the president’s family or cartels under their direct sponsorship. This autocracy is the closest the Chinese can get to finding a kindred spirit to their own homegrown communist authoritarianism in an African ‘elected’ government.

     

    Something needs to be said in favour of the Chinesenational interest in their foreign forays. As at 2020, China controls 15% of total world trade and still rising. Similarly, an estimated 2 million Chinese workers and experts are scattered all over the world engaged in various projects. This huge expanse of trade and manpower implies a global presence which dictates that the Chinese develop a maritime capacity around the world to guarantee the safety of their goods and personnel. And in any event, the West must understand that the rise of China as an economic competitor on the world stage has an inevitable military consequence. It is understandable if the United States and the West get unduly jittery over the prospect of Chinese military competition. That is in the nature of the contest for global power pre-eminence.

     

    Ordinarily, however, Nigeria’s strategic interests can hardly find comfort with the military presence of an anti Western power right inside its strategic armpit. The Chinese may have designed a foreign policy of non interference in the internal politics of African countries where they choose to conduct their business. In that regard, Nigeria may naively assume that Chinese presence in Equatorial Guinea does not necessarily concern us and may not constitute a credible threat. After all, China is a ‘friend’ and development partner. They have lent us nearly $3.5 billion in concessionary loans. They are building us shinny new railway tracks with rolling stock to ferry our millions around the country. Some of our high public officials have not disguised their love and admiration for the Chinese and their suppression of civil and democratic rights. Mr. Lai Mohammed is enamored of the Chinese control and censorship of the social media and their over regulation of conventional media.

     

    All this is costly naivety. It is convenient to trade with China as even the United States does. If we find that their loans come at a concessionary rate, let us borrow from them but make sure that we match our appetite for copious borrowing with a plan for responsible repayment. Otherwise, the shrewd Chinese will enforce forfeiture and repossession clauses in those loan agreements which are almost always written in Mandarin. Nonetheless, We cannot wish away the fact that we remain one of the West’s most important and long lasting allies and investment destinations in Africa. The United States, Britain and France would be hard put to trifle with Nigeria’s alliance and support in the event that the showdown with the Chinese assumes a loud international scope.

     

    It is significant in this regard to point out that the new Chinese naval facility in Equatorial Guinea is the first effective physical presence of a major power so close to Nigeria. As a matter of national pride and reflex, Nigeria has habitually rejected the presence of military bases by contending powers either in its territory or too close by.

     

    Older Nigerians will recall that soon after independence, the first major elite uprising against the government of the newly independent nation was against an attempt to sign a defense pact with the British government. Thiswould mean the establishment of British military bases in Nigeria. This was roundly rejected.

     

    Similarly, in the heat of the Niger Delta militancy, hints by the governments of the period to invite friendly countries to establish amphibious special forces facilities in the Niger Delta were similarly rejected. Even with the upsurge of the Boko Haram insurgency, international effort to contain the insurgency were treated as part of the global fight against international terrorism. The United States specifically suggested the location of a base in Nigeria to host the drones it was deploying to aid the operations in the Sahel. Those drones would enable it maintain surveillance and target Boko Haram and ISWAP movements. But Nigeria rejected the suggestion. Instead, the US unit is currently based in Chad from where it supports French troops in their Sahel anti terrorism operations.

     

    Rewind to the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the desperate dying days of apartheid South Africa, the racist regime came to see Nigeria as its most consequential adversary. Nigeria with its then vast resources and considerable diplomatic and military clout was the most lethal ‘front line’ state standing in opposition to the apartheid regime. But Nigeria was too far away and could not be easily destabilized the way it had done with its immediate neighbors. So, South Africa went shopping for pliant client states near enough to cause Nigeria some sleepless nights.

     

    Equatorial Guinea and Cameroun presented themselves for divergent purposes. Both being located in the soft underbelly of Nigeria, were attractive to a determined adversary. First, Equatorial Guinea was cajoled into the location of a South African military outpost with sensitive listening facilities. Second, the Cameroun government was encouraged by South Africa to ratchet up pressure on Nigeria by rekindling its claims on the Bakassi Peninsula. The government of Ibrahim Babangida recognized the credibility of the strategic threats and communicated its displeasure to both countries.

     

    In response to Equatorial Guinea, the Babangidaadministration’s response was a classic carrot and stick approach. In addition to securing a bilateral air services agreement that enabled Nigeria Airways to frequently fly into Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria undertook a number of assistance development projects in Equatorial Guinea. These ranged from schools to health facilities. As a ‘stick’ component, the Nigerian Navy activated a forward presence in the Atlantic Sea board with an operational base at the Calabar port and surveillance oversight stretching through much of the Gulf of Guinea. The Nigerian Navy’s flagship, NNS Aradu, was stationed around the waters off Calabar mostly as a psychological deterrence. The Nigeria Air force activated a combat strike fighter squadron in the same vicinity.

     

    In response to Cameroun’s irritations over Bakassi, Nigeria reinforced its troops presence in the border areas. In response to some skirmishes across the border, the Nigerian army displayed strength with restraint while diplomatic efforts at the United Nations sought to arbitrate the border issues.

     

    Nigeria was not done yet. On the diplomatic front, Nigeria engaged with the government of F.W Deklerkwhich was already prepping to dump the apartheid system. Very quickly, apartheid ended. Mandela was released from prison. South Africa became a free and democratic country. It no longer needed outposts for trouble making in our backyard. Nigeria’s response then was a mixture of some carrots, a dangling stick nearby and measured diplomatic engagement. That was the old Nigeria, at the height of its power and influence as an emerging regional power. That was the world as it was then.

     

    Fast forward to 2020-2021. China is in Equatorial Guinea not as an adversarial force. But it is close enough to cause us strategic concern. The question is whether the sensitivity of Nigeria was at any time considered in the sighting and execution of the Bata facility.

     

    Regrettably, what we are witnessing is the erosion of whatever diplomatic and military clout Nigeria ever had as a former emergent regional power. Our domestic economy is in a free fall. Whatever remains of our military clout is bogged down in internal security engagements with a cocktail of non- state trouble makers. We have lost strategic foreign policy focus,having run a government for close to 10 years without a word about a foreign policy review. Nigeria has literally disappeared from the radar of significant international strategic calculations. This is the context for understanding why developments like the Chinese Bata naval base are likely to feature more in the years ahead.

     

  • Which Presidency Is It Anyway?, By Chidi Amuta

    Which Presidency Is It Anyway?, By Chidi Amuta

    Chidi Amuta

    It is presidential succession season in Nigeria. Even before President Buhari begins gathering his belongings from Aso Villa, a throng of successors is virtually at the doorstep imagining what drapes to change and which to keep. Some ambitious wives may already be practicing the dance steps of First Lady in anticipation of the big day. The parade of presidential aspirants is typically and predictably Nigerian. All men. No woman yet. Scarcely any of the starry -eyed youth of the generation that trooped out to rattle Abuja with the ENDSARS protestslast October.

     

    So far, it is a mixed grill of the familiar long -suffering cult of perpetual presidential aspirants: former governors, legislators and some anonymous political quantities. They are being joined by a thin squad of not so familiar names ranging from academic technocrats, some bureaucrats, failed corporate executives and a few noisy lawyers whose legal practices have not done too well.

     

    At this early point, party affiliation counts for little. Declare as an ‘independent parties to join a party later or join one of the myriad other parties except the APC and PDP who have their succession lineup fairly frozen. Better still, just wake up in your bedroom, don a costume that fits your political fancy and pose before your cell phone camera. Declare your intention and aspiration to save Nigeria on social media. Low budget politics in the era of everyman as celebrity is a new growth industry!These are still early days in what has become a national circus every four years.

     

    In all fairness, the aspiration to assume the highest office in the land is a legitimate license that democracy freely grants every citizen. Democracy confers on all citizens the right to aspire to be president without charging you a fee. The theory is that in the absence of disabling factors such as criminal conviction or medically confirmed infirmity, terminal debility or proven insanity, every Nigerian is free to join a party, canvass an interest in or claim a right to aspire to become president subject to the rules set out by the parties. Therefore, the current parade of presidential aspirants is all within the parameters of the democratic ritual of legitimate rights and entitlements.

     

    Over and above the charade and the comic pageantry of the season, it is also fair to say that a few of the known aspirants are people who mean well for the country. Their interest in Mr. Buhari’s job boils down to a desire to do a better job than the Daura herdsman. But the primary entry requirement for the cult of presidential aspirants is that one must fit into the mould of the specie globally recognized as zoon politikon, political animal.Politicians are a special breed. They are incurable optimists, instinctual salesmen of intangible goods and subscribers to a unique language in which every fantasyis a possibility.

     

    Let us have the magnanimity to assume that we have in our midst Nigerian political animals with enough patriotic fervor to want to spend the next four to eight years worrying about everyone else’s problems. They want to chase bandits and Boko Haram around the savannah and the Nigerian end of the Sahel. They want to rescue those kidnapped, send delegations to assuage those whose wives have been raped. They want to worry about unemployed youth, women with unwanted pregnancies with no husbands, the price of cooking gas, ASUU on another strike, undulating oil prices and the generous supply of fake drugs in public hospitals. I know a few good men and women who suffer insomnia because antiquated refineries are being fixed with billions of dollars every year but refine next to zero liters of crude oil. Another friend of mine wants to be president so that he can attend climate change conferences since he could not be bothered to understand what it is all about. He already offered me a seat on the presidential jet if I can spare a few days!

     

    What no aspirant will tell you is that they are applying for one of the most lucrative jobs on earth. In truth, the Nigerian presidency is one of the most powerful offices on earth. It is replete with benefits and little mandatory responsibility in real terms. There is a guaranteed four years of publicly paid endless vacation, rent- free housing, free food and wine for self, family and an endless string of hangers on and pointless guests. While the US president has free housing and attending butlers and other staffers, the occupant of the White House has to pay for food for himself and family as well as all food and drinks consumed by his guests except on officially scheduled state banquets.

     

    In our case, there is the unstated limitless air miles and sometimes foolish foreign junkets in search of ‘investors’ from backwater countries with economies smaller than Ikeja local government. A Nigerian presidential tooth ache is best checked in the best European dental clinics!

     

    In the line of officially mandated duty, the presidency of Nigeria comes with unlimited powers and unfettered license, privilege, pomp and indulgence. On paper, the Nigerian president is constitutionally fettered by the powers of a bi-cameral legislature and modulated by the presence of the judiciary. But in reality, the Nigerian president is a near absolute monarch. He can convert the legislature into a gigantic rubber stamp, inundate the judiciary with a collection of bewigged yes men (and some women!) as judges. Our presidents have been known to frighten off or blackmail many state governors into nodding obeisance in exchange for federal handshakes.

     

    These excesses and abuses do not however detract from the reality that the presidency as an institution has evolved with time. A presidency that is merely 42 years old may not be expected to have acquired all the institutional refinements of those in older democracies. Yet from the inception of the presidential system in 1979 to the present, the character of the institution has evolved into a life and identity of its own. I take it that from 1979 to date, everything that has taken place at the seat of political power in Nigeria can be ascribed to the ‘Presidency’ as the central institution of governance and political authority.

     

    We need to be clear about the cultural identity, historical necessity and philosophical basis of the Presidency in Nigeria’s democracy. As an immediate but helpful contrast, the United States equivalent to a philosophical premise for its presidency is rooted in its history. There was a need for America’s New World political authority to reject but also resonate with some trappings of the monarchical absolutism of old Europe from which America’s founders were fleeing. Above all, the political authority of the new nation needed to embody the Puritan ethos that wove the pursuit of wealth and individual happiness into the heart and soul of a new creedal nation. Thus was born the US presidency as both ultimate authority, mandated dictator and perennially checkmated symbol of democracy.

     

    Nigeria is both an ancient cultural collective and a modern nation state. We came into modern nation statehood from a diversity of traditional formations. So, our supreme political institution must appeal to both dimensions of our heritage. We are a state that revers the ceremony of traditional authority but requires the governance management of a modern corporate state. So, the Nigerian presidency must combine ceremonial festival authority with executive fiat and the constitutional powers of modern statesmanship. The Nigerian president is both quasi royalty and constitutional chief executive rolled into one.

     

    As an institution therefore, the Nigerian presidency has evolved with time and the varying character of different occupants of the office since 1979. With Alhaji ShehuShagari as the inaugural executive president of the new system, therefore, we had the rudiments of a Bureaucratic Presidency. Bred and socialized into a British parliamentary political culture, Nigerians expected Shagari to adhere strictly to the best traditions of orderly British-style civil service governance. He was also expected to be guided by the outlines of Washington style presidential executive authority. The strength of the Shagari presidency derived from a trinity of structures. First, party supremacy ensured that the president was implementing the mandate of the party- the National Party of Nigeria (NPN). Second, an orderly civil service ensured that the deep civil service state endured to stabilize the keel of government and insulate it from the vagaries of periodic change. Thirdly, a gamut of presidential executive appointees- Special Advisers and sundry aides- guaranteed that presidential orders were carried out with a dispatch that justified the executive requirements of the new system.

     

    The return of the military did not erode the centrality of the presidency as the new heart of power and nexus of political authority. With Ibrahim Babangida, we enter easily the most powerful and decisive executive phase of the Nigerian presidency. An army officer who came to power assuming the curious title of ‘President’ deserved special attention. This was the birth of the Imperial Presidency. For Babangida, the presidency was not merely a source of governance direction. It was the centre of ultimate political authority and symbol of national power at home and abroad. For the bureaucracy, the spirit of the presidential system was to become real. Permanent Secretaries became Directors -General who would leave office the moment the tenure of the administration that appointed them ended. The entire nation became a uniform economic and political space, a landscape of wide ranging reforms towards a new economy, a new polity and a new society. National power was no longer a manner of speaking but a reality to be projected beyond our borders. Nigeria moved to alter the national histories of Sierra Leone and Liberia, to export trained manpower to third world countries, to summon the medium powers of the world into a concert of relevance. Nigeria moved and South Africa became free under a freed Nelson Mandela. The presidency became a symbol of power, glory and influence.

     

    After Babangida, Mr. Sani Abacha presided over a tragic shrinkage of the presidency to his personal stature. WoleSoyinka opined then that the only way Mr. Abacha could rule Nigeria was to reduce it to his modest physical and mental stature. Enter the Autocratic Presidency. The presidency was reduced from an institution of nationalgreatness to a pathetic object of personal aggrandizementand general political suffocation. Goons and killer squads stalked every island of liberty. Many lovers of freedom died needless deaths. The presidency became the central machinery of evil and repression to the extent that peace and order could only be restored by the terminal subtraction of the autocrat himself.

     

    The Babangida inspired imperial reformist tradition continued under an elected President Obasanjo. The ebullient Owu chief continued with a moderated version of Babangida’s Imperial Presidency. This president was a combination of traditional chief, military general and cane-wielding chief executive. The institution became an extension of the strong personality of a president with strong convictions about Nigeria and the world. For Obasanjo, the presidency would be strengthened if it became an institution for the establishment of other institutions on which democracy could thrive and grow. Anti graft agencies were born to prosecute his almost personal war on corruption especially among state governors who did not share his political leanings.

     

    After Obasanjo, we enter a phase that began with the nationalistic temper of Mr. Yar’dua. But fate dealt us a deathly blow in the rather brief tenure of Mr. Yar’dua, an altruistic good man with a bad health. With Ya’dua and Jonathan, we enter a phase of rule by persons of anonymity. It is a ohase that that can be described as the “Presidency of Ordinary Things”. No new grounds were to be broken. No novel initiatives or bold strides. No innovation either in vision or enterprise. Only a mere sustenance of traditions, institutions, practices took place. At best an incompetent prefecture presiding over a self driven corruption gravy train at a slovenly pace and a desire not to rock the boat. This was the dominant temper of the Jonathan presidency. It was this timid posture that energized the 2015 clamour for ‘anything but Jonathan’. Political entrepreneurs invested in Mr. Buhari’s mythic antecedents to sell the world and the nation an incompetent militarist as a messiah riding on a mantra of ‘Change’.

     

    With an elected Buhari as president, the presidency entered its present worrisome phase. A man elected as an executive president to preside over a democratic republichas been most deficient in exercising either executive authority or obeying the dictates of democratic civility .A slovenly civil service pace of governance has sometimes drained the life out of governmental processes. A detached monarchical absolutism has deprived Nigerians of the instant responsiveness of an executive presidency. A reliance on force and belief in fights has deprive the nation of the benefits of dialogue. A certain monarchical distance has ripped apart the republic essence of Nigeria’s democracy. In its place, Mr. Buhari’s natural autocratic disposition has created a quasi garrison regime in which the military has been drawn into civil internal security assignments at a scale unknown under any other civil democratic presidency in our national history. Under Buhari then, what we have is best described as an absolutist Monarchical Presidency.

     

    It is precisely the many limitations of the Buharipresidency that have defined the agenda of the present scramble for his succession. Those who are currently consulting and canvassing their interest in the top job have their task well defined and jobs cut out. A whole gamut of national travails and calamities define the current state of the nation. As it were, nearly all the factors that can kill a nation have been activated by Mr. Buhari’s monumental incompetence and lack of capacity to run anything bigger than a small agrarian local government.

     

    Primarily, the next president has to cobble back the fabric of our nationhood to reassure Nigerians and the world that the Nigerian state will not finally fail. In the absence of a viable nation, all the parade of aspirants will come to naught. An effective management of our diversity through inclusive governance requires a president that is first and foremost a Nigerian nationalist, not a sectional bigot. This requirement automatically disqualifies all those seeking to succeed Mr. Buharibecause they hail from any so-called marginalized section of Nigeria. It is not the turn of any geo-political zone to produce the next president. Rather, it is the turn of Nigeria to have an effective, knowledgeable and detribalized president. Nigerians have waited in the rain for over sixty years.

     

     

     

  • Mr. President, Try the other exit- Chidi Amuta

    By Chidi Amuta

    In one respect, President Buhari may have worked so hard to prepare his successor for the acclaim that has so far eluded him. He has unconsciously scripted a higher popularity rating for that lucky successor. The next president will harvest national and international acclaim by doing something that requires little or no effort: just being different from Buhari. Where Buhari has remained distant and aloof, the next president is likely to draw near, reach out and touch the people. Where Buhari has been reluctant to talk to us, the next president will replace arrogant silence with soothing compassion and expressed empathy. Instead of the stern threats of a parade ground commander, the new leader will hopefully offer us the candor of civilized speech in the language of ‘one of us’.

    Above all else, the next leader will have to explore the limitless possibilities and elastic benefits of dialogue to restore peace, security and stability. This means discarding Buhari’s perennial threats and relentless belligerence. It requires the humility to seek inclusive engagements with all the factions whose grievances currently endanger Nigeria.

    Dialogue as an instrument for the effective management of diversity is the next best road which, for some inexplicable reasons, Mr. Buhari has refused to travel so far. That gateway is the exit which this president needs to quickly find in order to escape from the lure of a tragic legacy even as he strolls towards the exit turnstile of power.

    So far, Mr. Buhari has sought to achieve a pax Nigeriana mostly by force of arms. But the failure of these efforts so far has demonstrated the futility of force as an instrument for the resolution of national discord. In the process, the president and his team may now be at the dead end of the deployment of the instruments and methods of war in the search for a retreat from the current brink. To fund the reliance on force, government has borrowed from vendors of death and merchants of debts to buy big guns. What has not however been tested is the elasticity of compromise and the enduring value of frank open discussion.
    Just take a look at the theatre.

    Against the jihadist terrorists and insurgents of Boko Haram and ISWAP in the North East, a decade long counter insurgency war has produced a more resilient adversary and re-drawn the map of Nigeria. There is now a red zone where the boundaries of at least two states have been blurred by something too dangerous to name. Against the roving train of marauding bandits in the North West, sporadic armed engagements by a security force drained of morale have emboldened opportunistic criminals into an army with neither command nor control.

    In the mid section of the country, militarized herdsmen have sustained an unrelenting wave of arson, murder and forceful land grabbing. The scenic beauty of the Jos hills and the lush green fields of the Benue basin have been converted into perpetual human abattoirs. Some Benue villages are now echo chambers for choirs of widows and wailing sanctuaries of countless orphans.

    Against the IPOB secessionist militias in the South East, countless special security operations have produced a combination of dangerous local militia and a strange phenomenon called “unknown gunmen,” military grade professional marksmen of speculative origins who are spreading death in a place famed for peace. Special security operations in the South East have literally exhausted the names of all the predatory animals in the fauna for brand names to no avail. In the Niger Delta, an uneasy calm has greeted a recent much celebrated legislative heist of the oil and gas industry.

    In the South West, an attempt to invite the imperative of federal force has produced a series of determined urban disobedience. There is widespread separatist activism, cultism, retail kidnapping and spirited armed robbery. Security infractions in this region have been emboldened by the migration of security manpower to areas of the country greater urgency.

    In all of this, something despicable has happened. In the quest for security, our fickle democracy has slid into avoidable authoritarianism. The elected president of a republic has shrunk into a tin god prefect of a virtual banana republic. A curious appetite for monarchical pretensions has produced a circumstantial tyrant above reproach and enlightened interrogation. A supposedly democratic national space has degenerated into a garrison and regimental hellhole. Protesting youth have been routinely visited with live bullets and pepper spray in their faces instead of rubber bullets or water hoses. In this place, the freedoms and rights which citizens in a democracy take for granted are now as scarce and costly as basic food items. Even the hope that this, too, shall pass now rings hollow with the futility of a hopeless longing.

    Perhaps Mr. Buhari has a right to look forward to some positive legacy. But his record indicates differently. He has led a government whose trademark is endless foolish fights. Fight against the Igbos. Fight against the Yorubas. Fight against the Middle Belt. Fight against the Niger Delta. Fight against the Hausas and other indigenous peoples of the North. Fight against the youth. Fight against the social media, the judiciary, against ASUU and against the medical profession. Most Christian factions as well as Shiites feel embattled under Buhari.

    While the fights rage and the drift to anarchy quickens, something fundamental in the lifeblood of the nation is dying. The basic communication that ought to bind government and citizens has atrophied. Government has threatened to deal with dissenting citizens ‘ruthlessly’ while those who disturb the peace will be ‘severely punished’. Niger Delta militants and Biafran separatists will be spoken to ‘in the language they understand’. Government has opted to address Nigerians mostly in the language of violent threats and incendiary retribution. The only crime which Nigerians have committed to warrant this barrage of linguistic terrorism is no more than a desire to be respected and left at peace as citizens. At other times, this ‘next level’ government has resorted to sectional abuse and divisive hate speech in its official pronouncements on legitimate national concerns. Let us not forget; hate rhetoric in an elected government is an act of treasonous violence and a travesty of democratic culture. Predictably, separatists, secessionists and the political opposition have responded in kind. The social media pages of key government officials bleed with torrents of unprintable insult.

    Yet it is common knowledge that in the arsenal of the truly democratic state, strength lies not in the ready invocation of state violence but in the delicate balance of stiff coercion with the soft power of compassion and a willingness to dialogue. The language of exchange between government and the people should be one of candor and mutual respect, not the reckless hurling of abuses across a divide of shame and hate. Pretending that government cannot dialogue with non- state actors is foolish arrogance. We cannot vanquish dissenting citizens by force either.

    It is therefore time for the president to try the route of dialogue to exit the fast closing corridor of national tragedy. There is no better hour than this moment of exit through the revolving doorway of democratic transition. The quest for peace through dialogue is by far an easier, less costly option. The total cost of organizing an all inclusive national dialogue on our current troubles is less than the sticker price of one A-29 Super Tucano aircraft at ($30 million)!

    Somehow, the aggrieved factions have simplified things by making themselves and their demands known. We know their leaders and their emblems. IPOB parades openly, clad in flags with the radiant Biafra sun. Advocates of the Yoruba Nation carry the emblematic wisdom of the Oranmiyan head. Even Boko Haram has its distinguishing black flag adapted from the dark covens of Al Queda and ISIS. Sheikh Gumi knows the bandits and their forwarding address. Boko Haram and ISWAP are now part of our national landscape. Nnamdi Kanu and Sunday Igboho are now household names, made even more popular by the arrogance of a state that fears the footsteps of its more courageous citizens.

    Whatever happens, the hour of engagement through dialogue has come. Dialogue will allow the government a breather from perennial fighting to rediscover the dying art of responsible governance. In matters of statesmanship and statecraft, strength is not the deployment of anger that can set the homestead on fire. Mr. Buhari has consistently displayed the trademark anger of an expired warrior. He has in the process reopened the wounds of war that have not healed after half a century. Twitter was banned because the president used hateful language to remind the nation of Biafra. But this systemic nastiness and endless governmental recrimination has only earned us a descent into greater violence and a drift towards the brinks of catastrophe.

    Those in the present house of power fanning the embers of discord and fuelling the machinery of state terror hardly mean well for the country. They may well be on a lucrative business mission. Every new threat to peace is an opportunity for profit. It is a chance to visit the arms bazaar with its promise of generous commissions. Each threat of mass protest or uprising against the highhandedness of the state merits a financial requisition to purchase instruments of law and order (guns, bullets, tear gas, pepper spray etc.). We are paying more these days to calm the storms that government sometimes deliberately invokes.

    By prolonging this state of undeclared war, our annual defense and security budgets have soared while our social development spending has suffered. Poverty and hunger have become epidemics while the expanding frontiers of anger and insecurity have frightened off serious investors. Only rogue miners, oil pirates and black market arms racketeers still find this place attractive. But it remains debatable whether we need these sophisticated fighter planes and helicopter gunships to combat squads of untrained and unfed citizen combatants on motor bikes and rickety pickup trucks.

    The truth is that each useless big gun or fancy airplane we buy with borrowed money means millions of our children denied education, several million citizens condemned to go to bed each night without food or thousands of our compatriots who cannot find a hospital or even first aid clinic. We are paying American and European arms dealers hundreds of millions of dollars while so many of our youth cannot find jobs for their able hands, willing hearts and talented minds.

    On the contrary, the cost of dialogue with all the pockets of anger and grievance in the land is next to nothing. The ego of political big men may be grazed or the greed of vested interest may take a cut. But the president must take higher solace in the truism that opening the gateway to peaceful dialogue is not a mark of weakness. It is instead a show of unusual strength, the kind of strength that elevates leaders from mere office occupants to historic statesmen. A place at the table of peace for all those who feel aggrieved and excluded is the first step to finding peace and security in this place wracked by anger and division. It will lower the national temperature. An inclusive national dialogue is the best opportunity to find out the why of all things that have gone wrong.

    For instance, we could find out why, after half a century, a dead Biafra is more alluring to some Igbos than a living Nigeria. Why does the South West, in spite of their relative prosperity, seem attracted to the logic of separation from a country that has benefitted from their industry? Why has wealth and shinny material things become such attractive to the north where the power of the dominant faith abhors the worship of the idols of material glitter? Dialogue is an opportunity for Sheikh Gumi to tell us who the bandits really are and what they want. Mr. Gumi might tell the nation in open televised forum why his bandits find risky violence more attractive than secure opportunities for meaningful work and fruitful livelihood.

    Boko Haram and ISWAP are not immune to the benefits of open dialogue. Insurgency fueled by ignorance and misguided faith can only be cured through corrective coercion and a battle for hearts and minds. A kinder Nigeria must embark on a massive re-conversion of these misguided minds. It is time to heal social and economic dislocations and de-radicalize the misguided. The North East needs systematic citizen reorientation complemented by material and infrastructural rehabilitation. A kinder gentler Nigeria should restore to misguided citizens happiness on earth in preparation for paradise hereafter.

    The things that dialogue will resolve are both simple and complex. We do not need Biafra to give back to the Igbos their natural sense of belonging everywhere in Nigeria. The needed political engagement needs not involve bullets and jackboots. Armed soldiers and policemen cannot be part of the resolution of disagreements in the civic space. The Yoruba nation needs room to determine their common good, at their own pace and scope as masters of their fate in a restructured Nigeria. Our compatriots in the creeks of the Niger Delta are waiting for that day when the management and control of the oil and gas resources in their backyards will involve their sons and daughters in more commanding heights.

    We have no business letting the children of Arewa loose onto the streets of our cities as homeless beggars. The Al Majirin kids need not be tossed around as ambassadors of a lost generation by an insensitive ruling elite. We need to quickly reopen the schools, return people to safe farms and secure homes. Only in a safe place can the lofty dreams in our prayers find us here on earth as a happy community.

    By the last quarter of 2020, America was at the brink of a civil war. Donald Trump’s toxic politics, warlike rhetoric and unrelenting belligerence had brought active duty troops onto the streets. Most cities and towns were engulfed by violent riots and protests. Joe Biden came campaigning on a platform of inclusiveness, dialogue, order, peace and unity. The morning after his inauguration, the cloud of war cleared. The mobs dispersed. The military returned to their bases. The protests dissipated. Hate and racism went back into hiding. America’s imperfect mission resumed.

    This is Nigeria’s hour to correct course and rediscover our missing mission.

  • A Hegemony in Trouble – Chidi Amuta

    A Hegemony in Trouble – Chidi Amuta

    Chidi Amuta

    Unlike the rest of us who are shivering about the prevalent insecurity and uncertainty over the future of the country, I doubt that President Buhari and his inner core of strategists have cause to lose much sleep. They have no cause to share our fears. They have always known something that we did not. The reason is simple. The president deployed and has been presiding over a hegemonic power template that I believe was deliberately considered, carefully crafted, fully calibrated over time and rolled out from May 29th 2015.

    All the existential troubles that Nigeria faces today are the consequences of a deliberate deployment of a template of power hegemony. The precise pattern of the current insecurity and the noises about separatism that we now hear so loudly may in fact be the intended consequences of the brand of power calculus that was deliberately rolled out in the last six years. It is my further contention that the present state of the country, the widespread insecurity, the general fear and uncertainty, the division along ethnic, religious and regional lines could have been factored into the architecture of the current power hegemony. The consequences may be unintended but they were clearly foreseeable.

    Even now, as the nation pressures the administration to find solutions to current problems, the possible descent into a garrison state are all intended consequences of the hegemonic power template. Because the nation will give anything in exchange for better security, the calculation may be that erosions of human rights and shrinking of the bounds of freedom may be tolerated in the name of national security. We have been here before. People may be detained. Some may disappear. Arbitrary arrests may follow. Curtailment of freedoms of speech may happen. The media has been under sporadic assault from the periphery. Kangaroo trials presided over by transactional judges may follow if judiciary workers do manage to return to work from a long strike. In this impending drama, random erosions and dislocations of the democratic order will fall into place as the intended consequences of an illiberal and ‘totalitarian’ clannish power concept. For the nation to go into a succession election season with curtailed freedoms in the name of security may be an advancement of the hegemonic project.

    Most of the things that have added up to the current atmosphere of fear, insecurity and imminent nation collapse were, I daresay, consequential outcomes of the choice of a power hegemony template. The massive infiltration of all corners of the nation by armed herdsmen is a creation of the last six years and could not have been accidental. If the literal nationwide invasion of armed herdsmen was accidental, how come the state followed that invasion with a planned RUGA cattle colonies project? When the cattle colony idea ran into a storm, how come federal might was deployed to institute some national livestock programme in some states with the dispersed herdsmen as target beneficiaries? How come a National Water Resources Bill with a clear domestic imperialist roadmap was floated and sponsored at the National Assembly?

    The recent overrun of some states by bandits and anti-state militants does not look accidental either. Some of the governors of the overrun states have been in the forefront of agitations that the bandits be granted amnesty and paid handsome ransoms in order to free their states for normal governance. The mass migration of armed young militants and homeless children to states far far away from theirs looks programmed. Why not retain the children wherever they came from for better social welfare attention? The mass influx and proliferation of small and light arms all over the country could not be accidental in a country that has border customs checks and a huge standing army. The elevation of Sheikhs, Mullahs, Bishops and all hues of prophets into middlemen and intermediaries between the state and bandits could only be an anticipated outcome of a hegemonic deployment of religion as an instrument of division of the polity and society.

    Those of us who have been shouting about bad governance as the source of the present nasty state of affairs may have missed the point. The game on display was not about good governance and a meritocratic state apparatus as a first step. Mr. Buhari knows the meaning of good and orderly governance. When he was presiding over the nation from 1983 to 1985, he could define order and responsible governance even if his autocratic streak was clearly evident.

    The current confusion is not about equitable distribution of power and positions either. Buhari and his strategists know what is written in the constitution and understand clearly that they have merely circumnavigated the provisions. Nor is it about justice and the rule of law or the other niceties that we parrot to decorate discourse about our pretensions to a liberal democratic status as a nation. Those of us who have kept insisting on these niceties were merely imposing our values on this presidency. We are the ones who are ignorant about Buhari’s concept of power and unadulterated hegemonic road map.

    With our elite democratic obsessions, we may have elected an executive president to preside over a modern constitutional republic with a diverse population. No one bothered to do a psychoanalytical assessment of candidate Buhari even based on his 24 months in power. But the incumbent president had no illusions about his concept of power, why he kept seeking a come back and the values he required to survive in power. Even now, I doubt that Buhari has illusions about his desired legacy or the definition of what he considers his constituency. Those who have concluded that the man hardly cares a hoot about the feelings and mood of the public may need to better understand the president’s concept of power.

    Mr. Buhari’s definition of national sovereignty may in fact be more restricted than what the rest of us desire of our president. I have a fear that the man’s basic mindset may be primarily clannish and nativist in a primordial village sense. In that mould, the man of power can only feel secure and confident when surrounded by his kith and kin, friends, in-laws and persons whose loyalty, language and culture are rooted in a familiar landscape of primordial loyalty to the clan, its chief and their sense of common interest. In Buhari’s brand of clan authoritarianism, therefore, the native chief can only trust his kinsmen to protect him, defend the estate, and generally tell him the state of the nation as a Medieval manor or fiefdom. The concept of the nation state as a shared space among citizens with equal stake may in fact be too distant to devotees of this clan concept of power. The farther the clan chieftain goes from his home base and comfort zone, the more insecure he becomes and feels. Those who can’t understand why the president hardly travels outside Abuja to meet the people in their places of pain and pleasure need to understand this! During the camapigns, he could go to far away places because he was in a desperate quest for power and the throne. Otherwise, he cannot trust ‘strangers’ no matter what the constitution says about federal character and national spread.

    Thus, though the outer format of power outlined by the constitution prescribes a balanced federal power structure, this president and his strategists have copiously dredged and mined the constitution to find the elbow room and weak points to prop up a power architecture that serves their narrow clannish design and immediate convenience but still appears suitable to our larger cosmetic desires and nationalistic aspirations.

    Therefore, the lopsidedness in strategic appointments that we are complaining about is part of the original hegemonic power architecture. It can only keep deepening because the hegemony requires it to survive. That strategy is an elementary tool of clannish autocrats and is only a necessary first step of state take over. It is routinely accompanied by a far more insidious but progressive institutional take over. For instance, in each of the strategic ministries that president Buhari has cornered for his clan(Petroleum, Power, Water Resources, Communications and Digital Economy, Finance, Defence, National Security, Defence intelligence Agency, National Intelligence Agency, Department of State Security, Police Affairs, Police IG, Justice-AG, Chief Justice, Army, Navy, Customs, Immigration, Internal Revenue, NNPC, NPA, Aviation etc. etc.}, for instance, you only need to look at the hierarchy of the component parastatals to find out the next five personnel in the line of succession.

    The concentration of power around this preconceived concentric formation is most effective when it proceeds from the armed and security services to the key revenue centres of government. When you enter a strange country, first ask who controls the guns and holds the money of the state and you will be better equipped. Thus, while the rest of us shiver in fear, the main drivers of the hierarchy of state power remain confident and unperturbed in their control of the commanding heights of state power.

    In order to ensure that the rest of the nation does not coalesce into a unified opposition to the hegemonic scheme, conscious divisive measures are injected into the polity and society to ensure that the polity is maximally divided and the hegemony proceeds undisturbed. Random terror attacks on places of worship, clandestine official support for ethnic based special interests (Miyetti Allah) and their elevation to legitimate partakers in national dialogue. In a factionalized ethnic based society, the greatest instrument for instilling fear among defenseless people is to arm one faction by deliberate official oversight. Enter the armed herdsmen, the squads of bandits and other bad people now roaming freely in the forests of the South East, North East, North West and now North Central and even the South West. The agents of insecurity seem to be armed with a compass that aims at the complete conquest and overrun of the entire national sovereign space. Whoever initiated and allowed the arming of roving herdsmen and other organized criminals as a feature of our landscape must accept responsibility for the nasty outcomes that now stare us all in the face.

    In summary, then, the current crisis of internal security across the nation is the direct result of the booby traps that lie within the template of power hegemony. The easiest road to stability and security in Nigeria is to uphold the balance of diversity that is the bedrock of the nation. In our national history, the most stable administrations have been those that respected the diversity of the nation in key appointments and the apportionment of patronage and distribution of federal benefits. Ibrahim Babangida, Olusegun Obasanjo, Alhaji Shehu Shagari and Dr. Goodluck Jonathan ran easily the most balanced administrations. In the post civil war era, these administrations have witnessed the most secure and peaceful periods in national life except for politically induced localized crises.

    Clearly, the hegemonic agenda has run into a ditch of its own making. A hegemonic political agenda is ordinarily a rather sophisticated project. It requires a leadership that has the intelligence, sophistication, savvy and dexterity to usurp the critical high points of state power while running a humane and efficient state. In the hands of a grossly incompetent, incoherent and weak political leadership, a hegemonic agenda is bound to unravel because it will threaten the very survival of the nation it seeks to overrun and overwhelm. That is sadly where Mr. Buhari has led present day Nigeria. The historic question of our time is simply this: How do we retreat from this precarious cliff?

    Other nationalities have heard the message of domination and become sensitized to the scheme. They are reacting as they see and deem fit. The divisive and separatist currents blowing across the nation are all reactions to the unhidden and reckless implementation of the original hegemonic agenda. The South West saw the unkind presence of armed herdsmen in their forests and neighbourhoods and quickly took steps. Amotekun was a prompt effective antidote. The South South has a battle tested instrument of resistance located in the soft underbelly of the hydro carbon life belt of the nation. The South East, repeatedly hurt and scarred by Nigerian history, has resorted to the weapons that only a sad memory can furnish. IPOB and ESN are one side of an unfortunate survival kit against a familiar adversarial overlord. Ebube Agu is the other face of a collective injury borne for too long. Larger formations along regional lines are transcending narrow ethnic boundaries to insist that the nation be restructured for equity, productivity and more effective governance delivery. People want to protect their own backyards by themselves. The federal might national order instituted at the end of the Civil War in January 1970 is on its way home. Ironically, the federal guarantor of security and national unity has been weakened by the sectional ambition of hegemonists led by one of the generals produced by the war of unity.

    The hegemonic agenda is the highest stage in the consolidation of the entitlement state. The Nigerian entitlement state guaranteed states a mandatory oil and gas revenue cheque every month irrespective of locally generated revenue or productivity. Buhari’s elevation of his hegemonic agenda to a state policy is the greatest disservice to the idea of one Nigeria for which many died. Now I hear the advocates of re-structuring are poised to overturn the pot of the entitlement state once and for all.

    What started as Nigerian politics as usual may have come to a pointed head last week in Asaba. When the 17 Southern State Governors met in the historic city of Asaba, they reached three most significant accords. First, they agreed that cattle imperialism must end by banning open grazing in their states. That resolution would end the reign of the cattle as a symbol of national division and crisis. Second, they resolved that the Nigerian federation be restructured for better equity, productivity and fairness in line with the best traditions of federalism. Most importantly, the governors resolved to call on the federal government to institute a national dialogue to discuss Nigeria’s problems and amicably resolve them through open exchange and compromise.

    The ancient politics of hegemonic ruse and violence has come full circle. The empire that was targeted for domination is about to collapse. The components of our commonwealth have recognized the hidden hand. The Federal Republic of Nigeria with all its beauty and promise is mortally threatened with dissolution in direct response to the anarchy inaugurated by the hegemonic agenda. Mr. Buhari is the carrier of this unfortunate historic burden and tragic eventuality. He has to decide whether his entire career as a civil war general and political leader should be summarized in the dissolution of Nigeria.

    For the rest of us, I think we should reject the logic of anger and the politics of anarchy. Let us resolve to save and fix Nigeria for ourselves and our posterity. The unifying slogan is a simple one: SAVE AND FIX. Come May 29th 2023, democratic progression must consign the pontiffs of hegemony to the thrash heap of national history. This house must not fall.

  • Saving Our Imperfect Union – Chidi Amuta

    Saving Our Imperfect Union – Chidi Amuta

    Chidi Amuta

     

     

    Aspectre of strategic instability stares Nigeria in the face. It is not coming from just the rhetoric of politicians or the drama of the new breed of ethnic thugs and populist demagogues. We are familiar with noisy threats to Nigeria’s unity as a mode of political expression. Nigerians as a public are distinguishable by our noisy arguments about practically every subject. Our political discourse is even worse; it is a theatre of menacing cacophony. Our politicians seek concessions by exchanging abuses in the day and caucusing over patronage and money at night. That does hurt so much.

     

    The ultimate real existential threat to Nigeria’s existence is coming from a convergence of bad things. What makes this moment more frightening is that we are faced with a rare cocktail of factors which would normally threaten the existence of any nation. There is a monumental insecurity the type and scope of which we have never seen before. A combination of a virtual oil market collapse and a global pandemic has literally wrecked an economy that has always been based on rents, commissions and sustained by syndicates of organized crime. To worsen this combination, the business of state appears to be in the hands of a chaotic and antiquated deep state cabal led by a practically absent sovereign. The national parliament, which should provide a bulwark of control and impetus to the errant executive, has itself degenerated into a conclave of infamy.

     

    But the critical factor remains the vortex of insecurity across the country. It has become part of the language of daily living to talk of kidnappings, abductions and brazen armed robbery to the extent that people no longer get shocked at such bad news. Government and its support cast of politicians have diluted the import of the current insecurity discourse by generalizing on it and proceeding therefrom to see general insecurity as the threat to national survival. Yes, the insecurity is bad news but we can help the security agencies by increasing the general understanding on the matter.

     

    It will not help to put the insecurity into one basket. There are two broad levels and categories. The lethal insecurity which is an existential threat to the survival of the Nigerian state comprises of armed insurrection of the sort that is a direct challenge to the sovereignty of the country. In this category are things like the long standing Boko Haram insurgency in the North East, the rise of banditry in parts of the North West and North Central and the widespread dispersal of herdsmen wielding military grade assault weapons across all parts of the country. These are direct armed challenges to the sovereign pre eminence of the Nigerian state and its corporate existence.

     

    These forms of insecurity require a stiff military reassertion of the territorial integrity and sovereign control of the nation. The clear and present danger that these forms of insecurity could lead to a catastrophic collapse of the state is evident. In most cases, the armed forces have proved incapable of liquidating these threats. In fact, some of these elements like Boko Haram and the new bandit gangs have occasionally outgunned the forces of the state to the point where only humiliating negotiations and silly compromises are the only options left for government to maintain its remaining credibility and tenuous control.

     

    The deep strategic danger of these forms of insecurity is the recent revelation that there may have developed an unholy synergy and collaboration among them. In the recent mass abductions of the Kankara boys, for instance, no sooner had the boys been abducted than Boko Haram took responsibility for their plight and released photographs of their militants with the abducted boys. In other cases, people who were kidnapped by free lance bandits have ended up being handed over to Boko Haram. No one has been able to reveal the sources of the sophisticated weapons in the hands of criminal herdsmen all over the country in relation to either franchise banditry or Boko Haram or both. In nations where this form of insecurity is rampant, the stability and sovereign existence of the state is frequently challenged to the extent that either the state perennially totters at the brinks of failure or accepts categorization as a dangerous place. In this category, we have Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Mali and even Syria.

     

    The second form of insecurity consists of acts of criminality either by lone wolves or organized crime syndicates. These range from transactional kidnapping, armed robbery, cyber crimes, narcotics trafficking, rape, cultism and urban gangsterism. This category belongs in the common run of criminal infractions which feature when economic, social conditions and crass materialism plus greed tempt errant citizens into criminal acts. These are direct challenges to the police whose responsibility it is to fight crime and use the criminal justice systemto bring criminals to book and ensure the security of law abiding citizens. These sporadic criminal acts are a feature of even the most secure nations. They never in and of themselves constitute a threat to national sovereignty or challenge the defensive capacity of the state.For instance, a nation like Mexico is wracked by some of the most sophisticated and vicious organized crime syndicates in the world. But this fact has never put the sovereignty and existence of Mexico to question. Nor would the rash of daily gang shootouts in New York City cause the National Security Council in Washington to scramble tanks and jets to defend America!

     

    A citizenry confronted by both categories of insecurity and who wake up daily

    to a barrage of bad news from all forms of insecurity may not have the luxury of distinguishing between ordinary crimes and sovereign assaults. As far as ordinary people are concerned, the world around them is collapsing and Armageddon is not very far off. As a consequence, fear of widespread physical insecurity has bred the most far-reaching and widespread form of insecurity among Nigerians. This is an insecurity of faith and a crisis of belief. Wracked from all directions by the perennial fear of imminent injury or death in the hands of kidnappers, herdsmen, robbers etc., most Nigerians have fled to the comforting embrace of religion. Even in this place of ultimate peace of mind, the agents of violence have infused their crusades with elements of sectarian division. Boko Haram terrorists and their bandit franchises no longer disguise their sectarian preferences or religious affiliations. While Shekau and his rampaging Boko Haram jihadists have never disguised their fundamentalist zealotry, prominent Islamic cleric, Sheikh Gumi has since assumed virtual ownership of the entire national bandit industry. Henegotiates ransom pay outson their behalf, is advocating for paid amnesty for them and succeeds in communicating with them where officials of state cannot.

     

    In this crisis of faith, the Christian faction of the national faith industry have little confidence in the state and fall back on agencies of organized religion like the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) to press their interests.

     

    In situations where organized religion and the dominant faiths offer little or no sanctuary for a frightened populace, the natural recourse ought to be the government and the state. Sadly, the Nigerian state has hardly ever been there for the people to entrust their faith in. As a result, the citizenry like a flock in a thunderstorm seek protection in the warm embrace of ancient and primordial loyalties. The tribe, the ethnicity and the moribund regions have come back alive.

     

    This is where we are now. In the last few weeks, something new and frightening has come to town. The threats to national unity have been hijacked by mob leaders and populist demagogues. They are all deriving their strength from ethnic, regional and sectional backdrops. Elected governors look on in utter helplessness and hopelessness.

     

    With neither verifiable education nor refinement, neither partisan affiliation nor structured political followership, rough ethnic and sectional stalwarts have taken over the high ground of national trouble making. Dangerous ethnic and religious mob energizers are waxing unchallenged. The new gangs are led by a rare combination of illiterate thugs and mob contractors. In the South West, an emerging ethnic solidarity front led by one Sunday Igboho with a background support cast of a Ganiyu Adams and throngs of tribal mobs has declared the imminence of something calledOduduwa Republic. Advocates, devotees and fanatical followers are growing both within and among diaspora Nigerians. Some diaspora Yorubas posted themselves on the internet shredding and cutting up their Nigerian passports!

     

    In the South East, the collective sad memory of the Igbo nation has been exploited to resurrect, declare and re-declare the return of the defunct Republic of Biafra. For years now, an unproductive separatist movement (IPOB) led by one NnamdiKanu, a man of doubtful means and uncertain qualifications, has hijacked the tragic memory of Biafra as an enterprise of sorts. People with neither pedigree nor education have been propelled into public notice and unexpected wealth by mouthing the name of Biafra. In a curious recent development, Mr. AsariDokubo of Niger Delta militancy fame emerged from unemployed anonymity to announce himself as the new leader of the same ‘Biafra’in an obviously sponsored mischievous machination to bunt the bite of IPOB and sow further confuse.

     

    In the Northern precincts, two formations have emerged. Mr. Shekau, an incoherent and confused zealot and his patented Boko Harem has been leading a religious insurgency aimed at carving out a Caliphate from the North East of Nigeria. Of late, a riot of bandit gangs operating mostly in the North West has spread mayhem and mounted bloody campaigns, freely abducting and kidnapping school kids, on an industrial scale. They have added farmers, local chiefs and innocent citizens to their human trove. Suddenly, Sheikh Gumi, a religious chieftain has emerged not just as the spokesperson of the bandits but also as a powerful mediator between the government and the bandits in negotiated deals to free the more embarrassing school abductees. As things stand now, we have a national formation of undertakers jostling for the carcass of a failing Nigeria state: Sunday Igboho (South West), NnamdiKanu (South East), AsariDokubo (South South), AbubakarShekau (North East), Sheikh Gumi (North west) and Miyetti Allah (Nationwide)!

     

    It is easy to dismiss the threat of unschooled thugs and mob merchants in matters of national security. But in the history of nations, persons of murky background and lowly nurture have been known to plunge nations into anarchy, bloody wars and costly insurrections. Master Sergeant Samuel Doe was an inconsequential illiterate subaltern in the Liberian army. Hecapitalized on public boredom and disquiet in the country to topple President William Tolbert and move into the Presidential Mansion in Monrovia. That opportunistic act of unschooled rascality plunged Liberia into decades of instability and bloody civil war. The sophisticated society of privileged onlookers, the professors, judges, journalists etc. ended up fleeing into exile as refugees in far flung places like Nigeria where the Liberian elite were seen queuing up for food rations in refugee camps.

     

    Idi Amin Dada was an illiterate Ugandan soldier. He managed to topple the government of Milton Obote and initiated a reign of terror. Uganda was plunged into unparalleled anarchy. The economy was wrecked. Hitler, too, was not exactly your ideal of the elite German soldier. He was a man of modest education and initial lowly rank who however carefully studied the political divide in the Germany of his time. He rose through the ranks to the summit of his party. The rest is history and the whole world has not quite forgotten the aftermath of Nazi Germany. Similarly, when the Arab spring dislodged the authoritarian Ghaddfi regime in Libya, it was inconsequential mob militia leaders who massed up in Tripoli and Benghazi to carve up Libya into hellish fiefdoms leading to the failed state that we have today.

     

    The threat inthe rise populist thugs and demagogues is worsened by the unenlightened nature of present day Nigerian society. We live in a Nigeria where the majority of the populace is still steeped in superstition and superficiality. This is a world in which the next ethnic group is the enemy, the rival faith is scheming to forcibly convert everybody else into their fold, and the neighbor next door has deployed juju to hijack your good luck. The populist demagogue and motor park thug leader who shouts abuses at authority is mistaken for a God sent liberator of the masses.

     

    The rise of these populist mob entrepreneurs is a dangerous reversal of whatever progress had been made in enlightened leadership in the past. A progressive region like the South West that had given Nigeria outstanding leaders like ObafemiAwolowo, S.L Akintola, OlusegunObasanjo, M.K.O Abiola, Wole Soyinka, Ernest Shonekan, Bola Tinubu., is now being escorted into anarchy by a Sunday Igbohoaccompanied by a Ganiyu Adams. In the South East, the land of NnamdiAzikiwe, AkanuIbiam, Michael Okpara, Louis Mbanefo, OdumegwuOjukwu, Alex Ekwuemeand the like is now cowing to the adolescentthuggishnessof an NnamdiKanu.

     

    Therefore, for the challenge of nation building and fostering national unity, these are the worst of times as well as the best of moments. It is the worst of times because never before in the over 50 years of post civil war peace time Nigeria have we witnessed such colossal insecurity and abysmal failure in the capacity of the state to rein in the forces of violence and anarchy. Yet it is also the best of times, a historic opportunity to walk back from the precipice and build a better place for our children.

     

    For those who are excited about the prospect of Nigeria’s possible demise, I have bad news. Large federations like Nigeria do not split nicely. The bad news does not end there. The naive optimism that bad things may not happen here cannot in itself save us from a destruction we are working so hard to bring upon ourselves. There is even worse news for those waiting to harvest the benefits of successor states to a failed Nigeria. There will be neither sleep nor rest in any piece sliced off the Nigerian paternity. There will be countless border wars, resource wars, wars over access to the sea, clashes over the assets of a Nigeria that dies under the watchful eyes of a disinterested United Nations. There will be endless troublesfrom itinerant and stateless armed gangs, private armies, unhinged militias, vigilantes and forces of darkness clashingover nothing except the carcass of a dismembered dream.

     

    If therefore question comes down to whether we should save Nigeria or allow it to self-destruct, my position is a clear unambiguous reaffirmation of the sanctity of our union with all its imperfections. We must save Nigeria at all costs. We must preserve its unity by every means possible. From that convergence and the consensus that we need to urgently build around it, we can have any number of options and allow any decibel of noisy controversy about the future.

     

    We can convene large conferences about a desirable structure of our union. We can mount endless partisan campaigns about the best mode of governance. We can disagree with facts on the desirable direction of Nigeria’s development going forward. People can mount the rostrum to pontificate on the scope of justice for individuals and groups of Nigerians. But it is too late in human history to subject our children to learning how to draw new maps, learn new anthems and fly new flags. By no means must we as elite subject our hapless citizens to the dire consequences of costly state failure and national meltdown.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • How country?

    By Chidi Amuta

    I have an ancient method of measuring the mood and state of the nation. And it has always worked for me. It is a casual greeting in normal Nigerian street parlance. Simply put, it is just a simple greeting cast in the mould of a universal non- committal question: “How Country?” You throw it around at people at the roadside, in barberss’ shops, on the drive way or as you walk into a shopping mall. You don’t expect any in- depth answer. All you normally get is at best a reflexive response that quite often gives you a quick snapshot of the way things are in the country at any given time. It is a sort of everyman’s instant state of the union address. No partisanship. No contemplative choreographed answers. Just straight from the hips knee jerk instant response. The answers you get reflect everything from the misery index, the state of security, the ease of finding work , paying your bills or just getting by on a daily basis. Most importantly, the answers are a function of how ordinary people are faring and how they generally view the prospects of our commonwealth.

    Because ‘how country?’ hovers as a hybrid between bad English and pidgin, dangling between serious enquiry and a casual perfunctory greeting, you mostly get variants of answers in mostly hybrid lingo as well. In normal times, you get: “We dey”. In times of political turmoil, you are likely to get: “Country bend small!”. In times of economic hardship, you are likely to get: ”We dey manage!” When economic hardship joins political confusion, you get: “God dey”.

    Somehow, it had always worked for me in journalism as a public opinion sampling technique. It was at once a way of expressing cordiality and fellow feeling, a reaffirmation of shared feelings as members of a national community of feelings. What irks me probably pains you. What pains me gnaws at your innermost feelings. Thrown at a troubled soul, the question suggests that perhaps there is someone out there who shares your pains or feels your hurt even without your telling them. But in the end, it is a way of saying that we are partakers in a community of feelings, caring about each other in a common patrimony whose state of health resonates in our private lives. As compatriots, we share something intangible, a common concern for the state of the nation and the state of the state that presides over us all.

    Deploying the ‘how country?’ informality, I usually use a crude sampling method to get a rough idea of the state of the nation or the feelings of ordinary citizens. This is something that neither my training in the humane letters, social sciences or media studies specifically taught me.

    On a given day, I would throw the friendly greeting/question at a cross section of ordinary strangers irrespective of class, ethnicity, circumstance or countenance. By the end of the day, I am likely to have greeted a cross section of fellow countrymen and women ranging from my gate man, cook, steward, secretary, driver, managers, policemen at the checkpoint, labourers at a building site or my customer, the woman who roasts corn or unripe plantain (year in, year out) at the roadside on my way from work.

    When I come home in the evening and in the quiet of my privacy, I would recall and rewind from the barometer of memory the findings of the day. I get a rough idea of the way things are at least from the eyes and gut responses of ordinary people, uncoloured by partisanship, self interest and the arrogance of position.

    At other times in past years, I would go out to unusual places where ordinary folk gather for the same sampling. This was before I lost my anonymity to the prominence of media exposure and the wild frenzy of the hearsay world. My favourite place used to be Ikeja Bus Stop, at the news stand where our informal trade union –The Free Readers Association- used to gather every morning to read newspapers that the vendors had spread on the bare floor without paying for any title. The vendors did not pay for retail space so we too do not need to feel guilty for reading their newspapers free of charge. There was an understanding that no one dared state. Our reading skills are first rate because you needed to get a quick glance of the day’s trend before the vendor asked you to pay or leave. That was our way of catching up with the news, our unique window to the day’s news. That was before the internet of all things began to deliver the news and more to the smart phones in our hands!

    At Ikeja bus stop on an average morning, in the midst of the ordinary people, you will encounter some of the most knowledgeable Nigerians on matters of public affairs, civics, national history and crude mangled versions of world affairs. There, above all, you encounter the unvarnished soul of our nation in its unfiltered essence. These were just people. I once encountered a cross section of them. Someone had spent decades working as a factory hand at textile factories that have now shut down. Another, a train ticket assistant had followed the old rail roads in endless journeys from Port Harcourt to Maiduguri, from Lagos to Kaura Namoda and from Enugu to Zungeru. These men were mobile encyclopaedia of current affairs. They came to Lagos and other towns when our people shared life in ‘face-me-I face -you’ yards irrespective of nationality.

    Here at the bus stop, the hunger for news used to unite us in an endless and perhaps aimless quest for something in the midst of nothing. We engaged each other often in fruitless arguments peppered with half truths and glorified hearsay. Someone would occasionally deliver an impromptu lecture on nearly every regime and administration that has ruled over our country. These were unaccredited experts on nearly every subject under the sun with travel histories that spanned Accra, Libreville, Luanda and faraway Freetown!

    They would apportion blames and pass verdicts with neither fear nor favour. They would casually recall past scandals, past heroes and villains and generally deliver judgments not coloured by partisanship or ethnicity. On most days, they have this uncanny ability to read through nearly every newspaper title on the stand with amazing rapidity in no time. They could make cross references across time and point out who killed who, who stole more money from the common till or who betrayed who in the macabre dance we call politics. I must confess that the bus stop crowd is predictably biased against successive governments. For them, it is a ‘they’ versus ‘us’ equation, which I find excusable but disturbing. They justify their anti government stance by insisting that our present rulers have not been different from the whites who were on the ‘other’ side.

    On the guiding question of “how country?”, the answer you get at any given times has kept changing with successive regimes. Most times, however, it is a function of what policies touch the people where it matters most. Let us take the contrast between a past administration and the present one for illustration.

    Under an elected Obasanjo presidency, the introduction of the GSM cellphone revolution gripped the public imagination. The new technology suddenly put a lot of power in the hands of the masses. Ordinary people in the villages, in the farms, in the markets, simple artisans and the army of youth on campuses and street corners suddenly found themselves armed with this powerful tool of communication and infinite possibility. Nothing like it had happened previously. Added to it was a policy of financial inclusion through the banking consolidation and the popularization of the stock market. Market women and simple traders in the markets were encouraged to measure their net worth not just in the quantum of cash under their mattresses or in their bank accounts. More common people began to operate bank accounts and to invest in shares and the bond market. Telecommunications and banking expansion provided the two growth sectors under Mr. Obasanjo with infinite multiplier effects that sucked up a sizeable percentage of the unemployed. Apart from sporadic and isolated disturbances such as Odi, Shagamu and Zaki Biam which were decisively put down with a level of ferocity that offended the human rights community. These incidents did not however graduate into nationwide insecurity. Nor did they douse the momentum of economic upliftment that swept the nation and put smiles on the faces of ordinary people. If you asked most of the people in the bus stop crowd then: ‘How Country?’, the resounding answer was most likely : ”We dey kampe!” or they simply showed you their new cell phone with pride ans a smile. This was a reaffirmation of confidence in national stability and the abilities of the national leadership of the time and the possibility of hope in the horizon.

    Fast forward to the period between 2015 and now. The prospect of a Buhari return to power elicited the resurrection of all sorts of populist myths in the popular imagination. The essential outlines of that leadership, I daresay, derive from a nightmarish past that most Nigerians would rather forget but chose to forgive. Undoubtedly, President Buhari has a retrospective fixation, constantly relishing his brief tenure as military despot as his brightest legacy in our history.

    Against the background of Mr. Jonathan’s later bumbling , Mr. Buhari was coming into office in 2015 shrouded in a larger than life messianic mythology. He had briefly headed an unsmiling military junta that abducted fleeing politicians in Western capitals, publicly flogged people in queues for scarce basic goods, jailed politicians and journalists for minor infractions and marketed an ancient austere and pastoral economic style and subsistence vision.

    Buhari’s glorious past is the ancient world of state control of the economy and export of primary produce. His golden age is that brief regrettable dark spot in national history when sirens tore through the night as the goons of state knocked on nearly every door with pre-signed detention orders. It was that period when no debate was allowed except the deafening rants of regime apologists. No dissent was brooked and freedom of assembly was treasonable. In that world, to be a politician was anathema as errors of commission or omission earned people the equivalent of several life times in jail. In that dark valley of our national history, to be a journalist was dangerous since the state defined what was the truth, how and when best to tell it.

    The populist mythology around that despotic interregnum appeals mostly to two groups of Nigerians: a small group of elite ideological simpletons and a vast army of unschooled and desperately poor young Nigerians who see Buhari’s so-called ascetic discipline as the antithesis of recurrent recklessness among successive political leaders.

    Five years into the return to the Buhari myth, Nigerians know better. In a video clip doing the viral rounds in the social media, a newly elected Buhari is heard bragging, fortuitously, that Nigerians will soon know the difference his return to power would make. Most Nigerians now retort that they indeed know better.

    In the last three months, gasoline pump prices have been increased three times. Beyond a 2.5% hike in value added tas, tariffs on social goods and services ranging from electricity to air travel have been increased. In the trail of a rather mild incidence of the Covid-19 emergency, jobs have been lost in droves as many small and medium scale businesses have ceased to exist. Youth unemployment has ballooned further, creating a huge army of young and unemployed people. The anger in this maelstrom boiled over recently during the ENDSARS protests.

    Youth anger at the excesses of a rogue police outfit spilled into the streets in waves of angry looting, pillage, jail breaks and arson. Under Mr. Buhari, Nigeria has entered a record second recession in five years, a record never before recorded by any previous leader, elected or self appointed. The same leader who presided over a nation dogged by poverty and scarcity of basic goods in the early 1980s is today presiding over the most difficult economic landscape in the history of peace time Nigeria a an elected president. The highest demographics of poverty in any one nation in the world (over 100 million) is the distinguishing badge of Buhari’s Nigeria.

    Everything is not bread and butter. But even the impoverished cannot find peace in their homes, farms or on the highways. Squads of bandits have taken over the northern half of the country just as casual kidnappers and sundry robbers roam freely throughout the country. Major highways, though hardly passable from disrepair, have become theatres of limited wars in shootouts between armed criminals and security forces. Never since the end of the Nigerian civil war has peace time Nigeria been so unsafe, so insecure and so dangerous.

    In the present circumstances, it has become hard to even pose the casual question: “How country?” The answers are benumbing. They range from ‘which country?’ to a studied long sigh and silence of the cemetery.

  • Social media and a rattled State – Chidi Amuta

    By Chidi Amuta

    The recent ENDSARS protests were bound to yield consequential outcomes. The more immediate ones are obvious. The general populace was ignited and emboldened in its consciousness of possibilities. The youth in particular may have discovered their latent power and united energy. Our deepening inequality and the reality of our poverty republic of over 100 million people burst into open display. The constrained negativity of the nation’s rough and dangerous mob was unleashed in waves of angry looting, arson and vandalism. Most importantly, the potency of the social media as this moment’s most effective communication tool has dawned rudely on official Nigeria.

    On its part, the Nigerian government heard an unfamiliar voice, one that is likely to return, again and again, in the future of our polity. The signals are clear enough. Easily the most conspicuous manifestation of the rattling of the state in the aftermath of the protests is a visible dread of the social media. You can hear the fear in the recent utterances of key officials of government.

    The ubiquitous Lai Mohammed, Buhari’s information and propaganda Tsar has expressed a preference for a draconian regulation of the social media: “If you go to China, you cannot get Google, Facebook or Instagram but you can only use your email because they have made sure that it is regulated.” Mr. Mohammed was defending the 2021 budget proposals of his ministry at the National Assembly and seeking support for a law to muzzle the social media. In his anxiety to curtail the influence of the social media, Mr. Mohammed’s choice of China as reference model is instructive. The minister probably forgot that China is a communist autocracy, ruled by one party with systematic abuses of basic rights and freedoms as directive principles of state policy.

    In similar vein, Buhari’s Chief of Defence Staff and National Security Adviser respectively have insisted that in the immediate aftermath of the ENDSARS protests, the social media is an enemy force to be targeted and subdued. In their conception, the social media was used to disseminate the ideas that powered the protests. For these security chieftains, the social media poses a national security challenge in the area of cyber-security. They were speaking recently at a workshop on the 2020 National Cyber security Strategy in Abuja.

    Quite disturbingly, a geo -strategic misconception of the protests has occurred. A conclave of governors of the 19 Northern states has unanimously advocated a censorship of the social media. This is a suggestion that the protests were a southern conspiracy informed by nefarious political intent.

    Official hostility towards the media has not been restricted to these timid reservations about the social media. In the immediate aftermath of the ENDSARS protests, the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) imposed a fine of N3 million each on four leading independent television stations- AIT, TVC, Arise TV and Channels TV- ostensibly for using video clips from social media posts in their news coverage of the protests. The latent threats on the media and the general freedom of expression and information in the country has raised eye brows internationally. The British government has had cause to caution Nigerian authorities against anti-media policies.

    The Buhari government’s specific nervousness about the social media is understandable but patently foolish and uninformed. The social media played a prominent role in marketing Mr. Buhari to Nigerians in 2015. But I suspect that a government led and populated by persons steeped in conservative conceptions of information and the media is finding it difficult to grapple with a new world in which the power of media and information power has shifted into the hands of every citizen who is wielding a smart phone. Youngsters and plain ordinary men and women, artisans, fishmongers, farmers and students have found a voice to contribute to the whirl of ideas and events flowing around us all.

    The time has passed when authoritarian African governments used to close down media houses, confiscate whole editions of newspapers and magazines and clamp their editors and publishers in detention. I am sure that Mr. Buahari recalls that time when he and his colleagues closed our news papers, sealed warehouses full of newsprint, jailed innocent editors for publishing the truth because it hurt their tiny dictatorial egos.

    In the age of social media, there is hardly a newspaper house to shut down. The editors and practitioners are either itinerant bloggers or just plain everyman. The news is being updated every moment in public transit buses. Powerful opinions and editorials are being conceived and written from the toilet seat in private homes. There are no rules and hardly any codes of conduct. The concept of what is ‘fit to print’ has gone out through the window. Each practitioner has his or her slant of the truth. The dividing line between fact and fiction has become so blurred as to literally disappear. Fake news is also news!

    This trend coincides with a democratization of information and truth, a diffusion of the power of the media and information. The fourth estate of the realm is now “all of us’’. We, the people, have become the arbiters of our fate and future.

    The real purveyors and backbones of the power of the social media are the multinational giant tech companies. They happen to be so powerful, so wealthy and so influential that they have become untouchable. They are matrixed with nearly everything that drives today’s world economy and national and international security.

    Each of Google, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram has more ready cash than most countries in the world. They are the custodians and carriers of not just private messages but also strategic information that determines the plight of mega multinationals, powerful nations and multi lateral organisations. In the cloud memory bank of these companies, the emails of the most powerful individuals and companies are stored and can be put to a variety of uses for good or for unimaginable ill.

    Such awesome power is the backbone of the retail level communication that we refer to as the social media. Regimes have come to feed on or be threatened by the reach of the social media. In general, liberal and enlightened democracies have little or no grouse with the social media. They only worry about its rough outer fringes, the zone of mischief and unbridled immorality. The freedom of individuals is central to the liberal essence of democratic society. Trouble comes in dispensations that thrive on the curtailment of individual freedom. The social media is the currency of individual freedom and the vehicle of an open society. Sensible governments exploit its awesome powers for the good of their peoples. The governments that constrain the social media happen to be either autocracies, illiberal democracies or aspiring dictatorships.

    There are concerns about the social media and its powers. Individual privacy occasionally gets invaded, unpalatable things get posted about innocent people while the normal decorum of decent speech and respect for decency often get thrown overboard. Moles, leakers and unsolicited whistle blowers have a field day. Yes, the social media is subject to abuse. Pornography and improper content finds latitude and wide circulation. Even terrorists and suicide bomb makers as well as determined mass murderers and racist bigots all find a free field in the social media. Determined trouble makers disamminate negative information that unsettles law and order in good places. It is these extremes of dangerous free expression carried in the social media that require the regulatory attention of responsible government and authorities around the world.

    The safeguards that society needs against the possible excesses of the social media must be part of the general safeguards that undergird responsible freedom of expression in responsible society. The laws of sedition, libel and infringements of official secrets remain valid.

    In a democratic society, there is no room for the curtailment of individual freedom of expression in the name of regulation of expressions that may not make a specific regime happy. Efforts to regulate the social media in terms of the dissemination of politically inconvenient truths belongs in the realm of censorship and the abridgement of the fundamental freedom of expression.

    Beyond the anxiety over the increasing powers of the social media, the sudden collapse of law and order obviously rattled the Nigerian state. Once the protests degenerated into lawlessness and hooliganism, concern for law and order united government and people. The people wanted the streets to resume their bustle and for businesses, schools and markets to reopen. For the government, the return of law and order meant the return of the business of state. But beneath this urgent necessity, the political leadership and the deep state were deeply rattled.

    Recourse to conspiracy theories was one natural response. I saw it in a broad spectrum of fifth column postings in the social media. One of them ostensibly by a certain Usman Yusuf was profusely bandied around social media platforms. It probably captures the essential drift of what may be the typical security script that could be informing the response of the Buhari administration to the ENDSARS event.

    This is a fictional narrative of a political conspiracy. It unequivocally alleges that the ENDSARS protests were carefully planned and meticulously implemented by political interests whose interests range from national disintegration to anarchy and regime change. “the ENDSARS protests across the nation was nothing but an attempt by some selfish individuals to rattle the cage for the presidential ticket in 2023. Failing that, they planned to make the country ungovernable to make room for an undemocratic regime change or cause total anarchy in the land leading to the breakup of the country…”

    Predictably, the fictional narrative would not be complete without weaving in the input of the banned IPOB group in the provision of foot soldiers for the protests in Lagos and all over the country. Even ASUU and the prolonged strike over remunerations is invoked as complicit by keeping university students at home and thus providing a ready pool of student foot soldiers for the protests.

    According to the elastic creativity of this script, the utterances and activities of key prominent citizens like Vice President Osinbanjo, House Speaker Gbajabiamila, Pastor Adeboye, ex-President Obasanjo etc. who warned against the imminence of trouble in the land if the divisive trends in government policy and patronage were not reversed as pointers that some of these otherwise patriotic citizens knew about the protests. It implies that they may be among the powerful sponsors of these protesters. The coincidence of these individual private views with the warnings of ethno national and regional groups like Afenifere, Ohanaeze, PANDEF and the Middle Belt Forum about the tensions in the land was cited as evidence that the protests were orchestrated and pre-planned.

    A timeline of events leading on to the protests was then carefully built around this narrative to lend sequence and orchestration to the huge conspiracy. Moreover, the national unanimity of the youth was carefully broken down into a north-south divide to coincide with the usual format of Nigerian security fiction.

    The script went on to insist that the celebrity community of popular musicians, comedians, influencers, bloggers and other facilitators now constitute an a virtual community which the organisers of the protests quickly assembled virtually to execute what was a political venture. For evidence to support the charge of organization, the voluntary support donations of food and other items by individuals and organisations was rendered as evident of organized support for the protests.

    Ordinarily, conspiracy theories can be useful in security analyses of sudden eruptions of upheaval that unsettle the establishments of state. But a conspiracy theory needs to be rational and logical. How would a band of unpatriotic and politically ambitious sponsors of the ENDSARS protests who aim to rule in 2023, divide the same country they seek to rule? How would they scheme for an undemocratic regime change in 2020 when they want to rule Nigeria in 2023? Why make the same country ungovernable now when the 2023 election is a clear three years away? When did IPOB become the ruing mob in Lagos where the protests began? When did our disparate group of internet savvy celebrities and youthful social media influencers join forces with ASUU, IPOB, ambitious politicians and active members of the ruling government to forge this unholy coalition that could spring nationwide protests? Why select the excesses of SARS and the long standing culture of police brutality as a suitable theme to launch this chaotic uprising?

    Somehow, the fictionalizers forgot that youth in different parts of the country quickly rose to own and domesticate the SENDARS protest to address the peculiar needs of their regions. Very clearly, youth in the northern precincts insisted that SARS was only useful in the region to the extent that it may have been helping to deal with peculiar security challenges like banditry, cattle rustling, random kidnappings, indiscriminate killings and Boko Haram which have since rendered most of the north unsafe and dangerous.

    Unsurprisingly, therefore, a good part of the response of government to the protests has largely derived from the outlines of this script. Now, alleged leaders of the protests are reportedly under surveillance. The Central Bank has begun to block the acconts of alleged leaders of the protests.

    In line with the sectional (North-South) drift of security thinking of this government on the protests, a closed doo meeting of mostly northern leaders has been hurriedly convened in Kaduna to deliberate on the geo-strategic political meaning of the protests.

    Undoubtedly, the ENDSARS protests have a political meaning for the government. It may have been mostly a spontaneous outburst against the long standing abuses of the SARS unit and the general lawlessness of the police. But for a government in power, the protests are politically consequential. The youth have raised a voice whose political resonance in the near future can not be underestimated.

    To that extent, the reflexes of the government are understandable. First the youth spring indicated a political consciousness from an unexpected quarter. Our political elite had long come under the illusion that Nigerian youth could not possibly amass a common consciousness as to unite around common causes let alone becoming a political threat. The protests put a rude sudden lie to that assumption. The protests were spontaneous. They were united. They were urban based and hence quite dangerous from a security and law and order perspective. But, the protests were NOT a southern plot to wrest power from a northern president!

    The challenge of the ENDSARS protests rises above the usual hunt for scapegoats. Nor do the conspiracy theories serve any useful purpose. The spontaneous youth uprising was beneficial in bringing attention to police brutality and other forms of official lawlessness. No one questioned the legitimacy of the government in power nor was there any pressure to change the democratic regime or the tenure of the president.

    The government of Mr. Buhari should take the early precaution of desisting from any tampering with the social media space. The same youth who utilized the potency of the social media to discover their power on the SARS matter are likely to rise in defense of that platform if it is threatened.

  • Trump’s long good night – Chidi Amuta

    Trump’s long good night – Chidi Amuta

    By Chidi Amuta

    In a matter of days, America’s democracy will self -correct and present a bulky casualty. Mr. Donald Trump’s presidency is unlikely to be revalidated for a second term. As the various polls indicate once again, the American electorate seems poised to deal the disruptive Mr. Trump a merited ‘F’ grade.

    The imminent calamity is unlike 2016 when Mr. Trump defied the projections of most pollsters to clinch an electoral college based victory. Then, he was untested and something of a fresh vacation from the humdrum predictability and boring correctness of political Washington. For most of the rural populace and the unschooled artisans and calloused work hands in rusty industrial cities, he represented something of a hope for the renascence of classic America as it once was. Now is different. He has presided over the world’s most powerful and richest nation for four turbulent years mostly with tragic consequences. Mr. Trump is leaving the White House in smoky a trail of serial disruptions, scandals, epic incompetence and divisiveness.

    In many ways, Mr. Trump’s imminent humbling is more than a personal travail. Democracy itself is on trial. So are the many issues that define its credibility and global preference. Even Alexis De Tocqueville, the French writer and definitive authority on American democracy (Democracy in America) did not foresee the aberration that periodically, democracy will present a defective outcome. The people will go out to elect a leader who ends up as the opposite of their best intentions. Ironically, only democracy can correct its own mistakes at the next election. In many ways then, this US election is a classic test of democracy’s self -correcting capacity.

    The dastardly rehearsal for the impending anti climactic moment for Mr. Trump is the last four years in which he literally subverted the most powerful political office on earth. For a rare moment in the history of the world’s beacon of democracy, the electoral process had produced a president who was a cross between a third world autocrat and 19th century European fascist dictator. While Trump held sway, the world held its breadth out of the fear that a highly unstable deviant genius in the White House could press the wrong button on the nuclear code with dire consequences for mankind. Every moment of the Trump presidency was minimally nightmarish and sometimes apocalyptic.

    In his ill-digested bid to ‘make America great again’, Mr. Trump spent a whole four years regaling his countrymen and indeed the whole world with glimpses of his troubled mind and arguably demented vision. It was a tragedy foretold and a disaster perennially in the making. Perhaps the greatest triumph and vindication of the liberal international order that was instituted after the Second World War is the fact that the world survived the disruptive tsunami of the Trump Presidency and now looked poised to reestablish a disrupted world order.

    For four years, the world has been treated to a quaint mixture of adolescent bluster and crude reality television entertainment as political leadership. Where his support base and the rest of America expected purposeful conservative leadership, Mr. Trump offered an overdose of unthinking posturing and showmanship. In a country where fact and statistics constitute the bedrock of governance and public policy, Mr. Trump offered an unrelenting cascade of lies, half truths and phoney figures to back up claims fueled more by a bloated ego than realities on the ground.

    To Trump’s curious credit is the emergence of the novel concepts of ‘alternate truth’ and ‘fake news’. Under Trump, fiction came to compete with fact as the currency of public affairs. The credibility of the media as an institution of free democratic society came under systematic and unrelenting assault. Not even the American political establishment was spared the scalding marks of the Trumpian blitzkrieg. He routinely insulted the leadership of the Democratic party just as much as he disoriented and astonished the leadership of his own Republican party. By the pre- election convention of the Republican party in 2020, the party of Ronald Reagan had shrunk to the party of the Trump family. Over 70% of speakers at the convention were either members of Mr. Trump’s family or his direct cronies.

    Yet it is in terms of serial policy failures and administrative incoherence and mayhem that Mr. Trump is most likely to be remembered. In four years, he failed to fill more than 60% of jobs in the US government system. He hired and fired key White House appointees with the regularity of underpants. Renowned professionals, decorated generals and other persons of high repute who came to serve under his administration either left in frustrated anger or were unceremoniously humiliated out by the temperamental fits of an egotistic president.

    His campaign promises ended up more as advertisement pay off lines than well thought out policy propositions. He was going to build a wall at the US-Mexico border at Mexico’s expense to keep illegal Mexican immigrants out of the US. He would shut out unwanted aliens especially Muslims from the United States and subject those who must enter to a series of ideological pre-entry tests. An anti-immigrant task force went knocking on doors in search of illegal immigrants before a court halted Mr. Trump. Never in the history of the United States has the policies and executive actions of any president been subjected to such serial litigation in various courts as under Trump.

    His international disruptive value was endless. For a nation whose history is rooted in a network of alliances and alignments across the globe, Trump ended up converting more allies into potential adversaries in four years than American has known in 75 years after World War II. His personalization of foreign policy was bound to escalate global tension. In an unusual transactional approach to foreign policy, Mr. Trump sought to make nations pay for their international defence and security obligations especially within the NATO orbit.

    Mr. Trump failed to realize that as US president, he was the inheritor of the historic burden of sustaining global order and security as handed down by successive presidents since after the Second World War. By rolling back the bulwark of US security guarantees to its allies, Trump was literally permitting nuclear capable and wealthy nations like South Korea, Germany, Japan nd perhaps Saudi Arabia to develop the appetite to acquire and use nuclear weapons. He made no secret of his admiration for all manner of autocrats and dictators to the discomfiture of time honoured American values. He openly admired and worshipped Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jung Un and Mohammed Bin Salman.

    It is true that US foreign policy has often had a destabilizing effect on parts of the world. It has felled bloody dictators only to allow the rise of dangerous armed factions in Iraq, Libya and parts of Syria. It has destabilized whole regions (the Middle East) and upset traditional balances of power in Latin America (Venezuela, Cuba) while problematizing territorial disputes like in Yemen and over the South China Sea. Mr. Trump’s temperamental diplomacy merely exacerbated these trends and made the world a more dangerous place.

    On the domestic front, Trump may have had a few disjointed welcoming sound bites about bringing back American jobs from Mexico and China. He probably forgot that US manufacturers shipped their operations abroad in search of cheaper labour and lower production costs following the aggressive unionization of US labour in the Ronald Reagan days. He could be excused for appealing to the popular sentiments of America’s rural folk, farmers, rust belt technicians and non -college majority for political advantage.

    Trump’s appeal to base instincts of racism and white supremacy weaponized American society against itself. He inherited a relatively united country and a healthy economy from Barack Obama but ended up creating a divided nation in which skin colour and systemic racism ignited a series of clashes and civil protests. In a belated attempt to appear like an advocate of law and order, Mr. Trump employed the strong arm tactics of autocratic dictators to quell the very riots and protests his divisiveness had ignited. He called in federal troops into the streets of Washington and other troubled cities to teargas peaceful protesters. He vicariously supported police brutality and the frequent street executions of mostly black citizens for minor infractions in various cities.

    Revelations about his moral deficits especially in his relationship with women are legion. Nearly every high profile defendant in cases involving sexual offences and financial crookedness in America in the last four years either involved a Trump associate or made mention of Trump’s links with the accused. Mr. Trump’s all too frequent flirtations with all manner of criminal schemes ended up sending more than half a dozen of his associates to jail for offences ranging from perjury, forgery, money laundering to multiple campaign fund infractions. Mr. Trump’s closeness to these convicts was sometimes so close that only the of his office prevented him from being thrown into jail.

    Mr. Trump’s singular qualification for seeking the job of US president was his over advertised standing as a successful real estate businessman. He endlessly brandished an unverified but over bloated net worth. Even then, he mystified his tax returns and muffled his massive exposures to banks. Though Mr. Trump’s endless bragging about his wealth remains very un-American in many senses.

    This, after all, is the nation of Sam Walton, founder of the Wal-Mart behemoth whose choice work location was behind the shop till and whose favourite transportation was a pickup truck. It is the nation of Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest single individuals who still drives himself to work and resisted that Microsoft should buy him a business jet to ferry him to and from meetings around the world. Not to talk of the great Warren Buffet who has lived in the same modest apartment almost all his life. Let us not talk of younger really wealthy Americans like Mark Zuckerberg with his $38 billion net worth, who is so enamoured of his jeans and t-shirts that he hardly varies their colours!

    In a nation that has long been greeted as the bastion of global capitalism, the minimum expectation is that anyone who hoists a business credential would at least pass the minimal tests of compliance and relative transparency. Not for Trump. He refused to disclose his tax returns and the brief details that the media sneaked out indicated that the man had not paid personal income tax for close to two decades while the maids and janitors in his gleaming high rise hotels sweated to pay personal income tax from their starvation wages.

    Mr. Trump brought into the White House his personal creed of ‘transactional everything’. Not for him the nuanced refinement of political rhetoric. Not for him the candour and modesty of high office and immense power. Not for him the depth of knowledge on policy issues that should guide the business of governance let alone the higher requirements of diplomatic candour needed in managing the world’s most powerful office.

    I doubt that Mr. Trump understood the higher need to protect capitalism from its own excesses. Instead, he proceeded head-on to pursue policies of protectionism, isolationism and shutting out immigrants and competitive trade arrangements with other countries. Some of these agreements had enabled American business to embrace global competitiveness. He would erect trade and tariff barriers against China, South Korea, Japan, Mexico and even Canada only to replace them with unworkable lopsided transient arrangements. For the United States, this meant a recourse to the early 19th century populism of Andrew Jackson who appealed to ‘the common man’ or the protectionist isolationism of the 1930s associated with men like Smoot-Hawley and Charles Lindbergh.

    Of course Trumpism as a decadent iteration of conservatism has had its followership not just in the United States but elsewhere by other names. Its primary appeal is the urge to constrict national spaces and resources to a native square. The nation state becomes more or less a tribe of narrow-minded demagogues, a playground for opportunistic troublemakers and part time political rascals intent on hacking down long standing institutions of state. The rhetoric is a drive for ‘change’ from politics as usual to transactional politics, a shorthand for political anarchism. It is an autocratic populism that demolishes but hardly has a plan to reconstruct.

    In the case of Trump and the United States, however, the pursuit of policies and rhetoric that promotes isolationism and shrinkage run counter to the bedrock of the founding vision of America, a robust civilization founded by immigrants with a global world historic mission and vision. America was founded as a nation of immigrants, a place of great diversity and immense opportunity for those ready to work. Its strength and purpose derive from these fundamental values, which have catapulted it in a quarter of a century from an experimental creedal nation into a global civilization. It was designed as diverse, expansive and inclusive force for global good, not the bastion of smallness and divisive meanness that Trump reduced it to.

    In America’s presidential system, the title of “Commander in Chief” has more than a ceremonial purely military meaning. It places on the shoulder of the president the burden of defending and protecting the nation from every threats: military, climatic, epidemiological and even doctrinal. Unfortunately for Trump, while he was busy retooling America’s awesome war machine for strategic military eventualities, the Coronavirus struck. It was perhaps the unseen enemy of this virus that has dealt the lethal blow to the Trump presidency. Owing squarely to Mr. Trump’s recklessness and plain incompetence, the US has recorded the highest figures of infection (over 9 million) and death (9over 225,000) of all nations of the world. Mr. Trump’s leadership in this historic national emergency is a grave embarrassment to the world’s richest and most advanced nation.

    There is therefore a larger sense in which the imminent US Presidential election is a referendum on the Trump presidency. The imminent rejection of Mr. Trump at the polls would be a loud rejection not only of his decadent brand of conservatism but also of his embarrassing incompetence. It is the fitting punishment for a commander in chief who could not protect himself, his family and the White House from a virus that small nations had under control.

    From the myriad negatives of the Trump Presidency the road map for the first term of the imminent Biden presidency have been sketched. Even if Mr. Biden had no agenda of his own, just a serial reversal of most of Trump’s footprints is work enough.

  • Bishop Kukah’s rejoinder to Chidi Amuta’s Column: Of Igbos, 2023 and ‘Politics of Moral Consequence’

    Bishop Kukah’s rejoinder to Chidi Amuta’s Column: Of Igbos, 2023 and ‘Politics of Moral Consequence’

    Empowered citizens voted for politicians they knew would make them poorer, for liars to clean up politics -Tom Fletcher, The Naked Diplomat.

    Dr Chidi Amuta takes the cake for both elegant turn of phrase and sheer depth of thoughtful analysis. I read his recent piece in THISDAY, (also in TheNewsGuru.com), ‘2023: Igbos and the Politics of Moral Consequence’ on a bumpy ride back to Sokoto. The essay is not exactly a foolproof DIY tool kit for the construction of the road to Aso Rock for his Igbo kinsmen. However, it manages to identify some harsh pebbles and nails whose litter have made the journey to the Presidency a Golgothean challenge for the Igbos. Instructively, the essay does not address the issues of why some have crossed with so much ease while the Igbos remain stuck in a frustration of Sisyphean proportions.

    When I got back to Sokoto, I put a call through to Dr. Amuta to commend him for the essay and say how much I had appreciated his insights. But when I woke up the next morning, a few fresh thoughts came to my mind, suggesting that despite the brilliance of the essay, it had thrown up a few grey areas that required further exploration. Indeed, as I had tried to do in my Convocation Lecture at the Ojukwu University, Awka on 20th March, 2020, the need for a robust conversation about the future of our country is imperative.

    Therefore, my intention here is not to respond directly to the issues raised by Dr Amuta by way of a rebuttal because I agree substantially with his summation. What I wish to add is done with the hope that we can create a momentum for an orchestra of voices to shape the future and destiny of a nation that is gradually and inexorably sliding and screeching to a precipice. I have a few insights to buttress that point.

    As Secretary of the National Political Reform Conference (NPRC) in 2005, that offered me a front seat and helped me to appreciate the reasons why the politics of this country is devoid of the required content for building a great nation. In the course of the NPRC assignment, I came to appreciate that nothing, absolutely nothing, had changed in content and substance in terms of how, over time, these gatherings have been nothing other than dress rehearsals and platforms to negotiate, barter and trade ambitions for the future. The composition of these Assemblies is often so fractious that it often ends up being a theatre for negotiating centrifugal interests. In the end, it is the national interests that suffer while national cohesion becomes a delayed project.

    What we call political parties, those rickety and dilapidated rickshaws we see changing wheels with every election, have always been conceived in the midnight of these so called Assemblies. Meanwhile, groups pledge false loyalties against one another along ethnic, regional and religious lines. This has been our fate right from 1977 through 1988, 1995 and 2013. The result is that the proceedings end up in the valley of the dry bones where they pile on top of their predecessors.

    I have gone to this length to illustrate the fact that despite the presence of serious minded intellectuals, their expertise has often been subsumed in the narrow and clannish interests of their ethnic, religious or regional interests. But the old ways can no longer hold and the looming danger that lies before us has to be averted not by threats, but by deliberate planning and thinking. We are facing a new generation of young, bright and future looking men and women for whom the old ways are a serious obstacle. They have their eyes on a future that is not here yet. They have designed ways and means of pulling down the walls of hegemony that have held the future captive and made Nigeria the object of ridicule and obloquy. The youth have enough weapons to destroy this treacherous heist from its very foundation.

    Now to come back to Dr. Amuta. He raised the issues of what the country owes the Igbos under the doctrine of moral consequence. He carefully crafted a list of countries from where the rest of Nigeria can learn its lessons in recompense. But I see two problems here. First, Dr. Amuta assumes that his readers really understand the meaning of the doctrine of moral consequence. A definition of this notion would have been of great help so as to help situate his arguments in our context. Although he cites countries such as Australia, Rwanda or South Africa, it is important to understand that when applied to Nigeria, this theory requires conceptual and contextual clarifications.

    First, as we know, in politics as in economics or any other aspects of human existence, culture defines, shapes and explains most behaviours. It is important to note that moral consequence as an ethical theory requires a cultural or theological underpinning. A given society has to have some form of common cultural understanding of its laws or ties that bind. All the countries that Dr. Amuta listed have a Christian tradition. It would have been important to site any Muslim country which has applied this theory of moral consequence.

    If we place moral conquentialism within the larger ethical template of Utilitarianism, we will have to wrestle with whether we derive our inspiration from Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, John Stewart Mill or John Rawls. We do not need to get into the arguments but it is important to note that here, we are on a slippery slope because the Nigerian politician is not guided or grounded by any of these deep philosophical postulations. Dem no wan grammar, remember?

    The lack of an ethical framework to undergird all spheres of our life is what has led our country to a moral free fall in all areas. We are groaning under the weight of corruption, but this is because Ethics has found no place in our educational systems or public life. Without ethics, we return to the state of nature in its most brutal form. Here, let us pause and spare a thought as to how this problem has been metastasized. As we know, life itself is a long journey of negotiation, consensus building and a struggle to ensure that the strong do not overrun the weak, that the urge to do good outweigh the urge for evil. We are therefore constantly negotiating these choices, seeking the greatest benefit for the greatest number. This comes at a great cost because it depends on human nature and nurture.

    Dr Amuta believes that one of the problems that the Igbos face on their way to the Presidency is the fact that, in his words, ‘It is an unwritten and unstated presumption that Nigeria can still not find in its heart to forgive the Igbos for Biafra.’ I find this reading of the situation quite troubling because first, Dr. Amuta does not spell out which Nigeria he is referring to. Okay, may be our brother Chido Onuma overstated it when he said ‘We are all Biafrans now’. Truth be told, there is resonance in that claim. Indeed, I was told by a senior military officer that the late Major General Hassan Usman Katsina called a meeting of retired military officers from the Middle belt to ask why they had become so frustrated and one of the Christian military leaders who actually was of the same generation as Katsina said: ‘Were the civil war to start today, I will be on the side of Biafra!’

    Perhaps the Igbos are to blame for not positioning their wind vane properly otherwise, Dr. Amuta will understand that his thesis is seriously flawed. The north unraveled a long time ago and what is left is a scarecrow that still frightens some ignorant people in the south. Evidently, the Igbos and others must cure themselves of their horrifying ignorance of the complex mesh that is northern Nigeria. We hear the ignorance about the north being one and united. Well, ask the Shi’ites, Izala, Tijaniya, the Middle Belt, ask the Nupe, Kanuri, and Hausa what they feel or believe about this north. A survey conducted found that while just 35% of Muslims in northern Nigeria wanted to be identified as Sunni, a whopping 30% just wanted to be Muslim, with no other label. Outsiders have refused to appreciate the mutations of identities within Islam and continue to ignore how most of this affects political choices. If Dr. Amuta and kinsmen do not appreciate this, then they will remain in the rain for much longer by default.

    Despite painting the picture of the Igbos as having been sinned against (which is true), Dr. Amuta rather strangely places the burden of redemption on the shoulders of the same people by saying that: ‘The Igbo political elite has to reduce its habitual fears and nervousness of the competing elite of other factions in the country’. How and why should the Igbos do this? After all, they have not invaded anyone’s territory except through their economic presence. They have not destroyed any national assets. So, how is this gratuitous appeasement of other factions supposed to take place? How should the Igbos be charged for the fears and nervousness of other competing elites when they are the ones who should be afraid and nervous after the loss of their war?

    I agree that the weaponization of Biafra may have long time consequences but I am slow to accept the conclusion that it is ‘a tactical blunder that will frighten Nigeria.’ We have to place this in context and not moralise it. The average Igbo youth today in his thirties of forties will know that in the last twenty years of our Democracy, every section of the country has gotten its President by some threats of spilling blood. This is not any attempt to glamourize violence, but let us be truthful in the face of the staggering evidence: Odu’a Peoples’ Congress (OPC) in its raw form frightened the rest of the country after June 12th and it took this into the elections of 1999. They can claim they got a Yoruba man for President for what it is worth. The Ijaw Youth can also claim to have frightened the rest of Nigeria by blowing up pipelines before they received their son, President Jonathan as a concession of sorts.

    Similarly, elements of Boko Haram in whatever shape or form, the killer men and women running riot in the country and murdering thousands of innocent citizens despite having been paid off, can claim credit to pursing an agenda in which fear is an investment. Threats of blood for monkey and baboon were loud in 2011. The Biafran agitators are a symptom not a disease. The real disease has been spread by the brutal politics of the other segments of Nigeria that inadvertently made violence the commodity of exchange for the Presidency. We can only reverse this ugly scenario if we are honest enough to accept that what we have as politics in Nigeria is blood and banditry by another name!

    Dr. Amuta ends his beautiful essay with some troubling recommendations for the Igbos if they want to get the Presidency. First, he encourages the Igbos to adopt a policy of ‘deft foot walk, negotiation with other groups, abandon disturbing pride, arrogance and noisy ebullience for fear that it will unsettle competitors’. He accuses the Igbos of ‘not getting on their knees to seek a favour’, and suggests what he calls ‘pragmatic flexibility’ as the way forward, because, as he concludes: ‘When you go out to seek the lion’s share of what belongs to all, you go in meekness’. Lord God Almighty!

    First, Nigeria’s political grounds are a treacherous slippery slope of deceit and subterfuge and so, no amount of deft foot walk will do. You can only negotiate successfully if both of you understand and sign on to the same rules of engagement and agree on outcomes. The current administration is the poster child of this subterfuge and convoluted moral consequence. Those who sank their energy and money into this project have come face to face with the reality that their deft foot walk has led them blinded folded into a darkroom where they are asked to hopelessly chase the black cats of opportunity. Has President Buhari (the lion) shared what belongs to all even with the meek? Last time I checked, the lion hunts alone! The immoral power sharing method of this President has exposed the folly of those who believe that deft foot walk and negotiations are a guarantee for the future of the Igbos. The nation is wounded but I believe in the long run, the President has mortally wounded the north itself.

    When Dr Amuta charges the Igbos with ‘pride, arrogance, noisy ebullience’ and suggests that they should fear the consequences of unsettling their competitors, he is, in my view, asking them to lie on their own sword helped by their competitors. To compound his case, Dr. Amuta suggests that the Igbos ‘get on their knees to seek a favour’ and then engage in pragmatic flexibility. However, he does not offer us examples of the rewards that have come to those who engaged in previous knee bending, fawning, obsequious or pragmatic flexibility in the past. I will like to see the list of those so rewarded, no matter how short it may be.

    In conclusion, the task of rescuing Nigeria falls on the elite of Nigeria who must raise the bar for elitism in its capacity to redeem and rescue a people by imposing a new civilisation. African Democracy remains prostrate because it has still not freed itself from the clutches of both British colonialism and local feudalisms. The quality of men and women at the helm of affairs cannot rescue this county from its current state of decay and looming decomposition. The future does not lie on which region, religion or tribe will produce the next President. This is the legacy of the feudalists and hegemonists across the country and only a careful elite prescription can understand where the world is going.

    The Igbos must reconnect with their Yoruba and other educated elite, replace the corrosive politics of ethnicity with the quality of mind that knows how to channel diversity to greater and higher goals. Tribal politics will continue to produce the toxic ingredients of death and destruction that has engulfed us. Contrary to what Dr. Amuta seems to suggest, I am convinced that the Igbos are the most politically advantaged: they have the ubiquitous presence and human and economic resources more than anyone. And, rather than seeing this as an incubus, I see it as an asset. If we elevate politics to a noble art of intellectuals setting goals and developing a vision for the larger society, we can then create the conditions for everyone to thrive no matter where they may be. Tribal politics have destroyed Nigeria and we must destroy its temple so as to free ourselves. Until that happens, the moral consequences of our politics will continue to be chaotic and violent. Nigeria will remain in the hands of violent and evil men, men of darkness already circling around the country and ready to lead us into darkness. Their footsteps are already on our doorsteps. We must find our black goat before darkness engulfs us.

    • Kukah is Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto

    2023: Igbos and the Politics of Moral Consequence

    By Dr. Chidi Amuta

    National history has a moral arc. It bends perennially in the direction of justice no matter how long it takes. This truism is my response to the three dominant positions on the desirable geo-political location of the Nigerian presidency in 2023. The first is the repeated general political advisory by my friend Nasir El-Rufai, Governor of Kaduna State, that the next president should not come from the northern zones of the country. The second is the ambiguous view of Mr. Mamman Daura, President Buhari’s nephew, that subsequent presidents after Mr. Buhari should be chosen on the basis of ‘merit’, whatever that means. The third is the entitlement preference of the South Eastern political and cultural elite that the next president should emanate from their zone.
    Ordinarily, discourse on succession preferences in a democracy ought to be determined by two factors: pressing issues of national concern; or leading political figures in the contending parties and their stand in relation to important national issues. Succession should not be determined by either directions on a compass or some other primordial consideration. But this is Nigeria. It is a nation conceived in compromise, nurtured in aggressive geo ethnic competition and sustained by hegemonic blackmail and systemic injustices.
    The agitation for a shift of the locus of presidential power to the South East is however rooted in the general history of nations. No nation is an immaculate conception. Nearly every national history is an undulating pageant of glorious moments and inevitable episodes of brutish savagery and intense sadness. Nations come into being and progress sometimes by willfully or inadvertently hurting sections of their populace. Communal clashes, ethnic conflicts, civil wars, slavery, genocide, pogroms, insurgency, foolish mass killings and reprisals thereof are part of national history. When the hour of sadness passes, a nation so afflicted incurs moral debts to those sections of the community that have been hurt.
    Subsequent social peace and political order in a nation as a community of feelings is often dependent on how the moral arc bends in relation to healing the injuries of the past. The mere passage of time is never enough to heal the moral wounds that lie buried in the hearts of injured precincts of a nation. As a strategy of national survival, nations with past injuries have had to confront the moral consequences of their past through conscious management of the political process. Such managed political process implies a recalibration of the moral compass of the nation. It is politics in the service of the higher meaning of democracy when democratic outcomes redress injustices. This is the essence of the politics of moral consequence. Its ultimate aim is to avert the dire consequences of a nation sustained on systemic injustice.
    Nigeria is neither the first nor the last nation to come face to face with the ugly face of its past. In 2008, the United States of America rose in democratic unison to right the systemic historic wrong of its racist past by electing Barak Hussein Obama as its first black president. Similarly, by the first half of 1994, the very survival of the Rwandan nation was threatened by the injustice of the genocide against the Tutsis minority. It was a Tutsi army officer that crossed the border from Uganda, leading the forces that ended the anarchy. By 2000, that gallant soldier, Paul Kagame, was elected President of a reconciled Rwanda. His subsequent re-elections have led to the reconciliation, peace and prosperity that have become the hallmarks of modern Rwanda.
    The South African story is too familiar. Yet, it was the recognition by the white apartheid regime that only true majoritarian democracy would restore harmony, peace and order to end decades of violent revolt. That realization and the conscious political actions that followed led to the enthronement of a free and democratic South Africa. Nelson Mandela became the president of a multi racial South Africa. The rest is history.
    Australia too has had to confront and assuage a ghost from its past. There was a prolonged unease about injustices against Australian Aborigines, especially the forced removal of indigenous children (‘the Stolen Generations’) as well as centuries of discrimination and neglect by the state. In 2008, then Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, summoned the moral courage to apologise to the injured. On 13th February, 2008, parliament passed a historic resolution mandating an open apology to the Aboriginal population. Hear the words: “We apologize for the laws and policies of successive…governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians…, (For all these), we say sorry”
    Similar recourse to national piety, regret and compassion is not strange to Nigeria. In a sense, the Nigerian nation is an example of the merits of national reconciliation and magnanimity. Our civil war ended without major physical reprisals against the ex -Biafrans. In the wake of the annulment of the June 12, 1992 presidential elections presumptively won by M.K.O Abiola, the Yorubas of the South West felt injured by the Nigerian military state. The nation came to a virtual stop. Social and political order were abridged. In a hastily revamped political transition project in 1998, the political system was consciously managed to field two Yoruba candidates, Olu Falae and Olusegun Obasanjo. The latter became president. A sense of justice was restored. Peace and order returned to the nation.
    Late president Umaru Yar’dua was a man of unusual commitment and impeccable patriotism. He inherited a Nigeria that was wracked by fierce militancy by youth of the Niger Delta against environmental and economic injustices. The nation was virtually at war with itself. The survival of the economy was severely threatened. President Yar’dua adopted a combination of military suppression and the olive branch of the Amnesty Programme. When Yar’dua died mid stream in his tenure, the political system ensured his succession by Goodluck Jonathan, a son of the troubled Niger Delta. Jonathan consummated the Yar’dua peace plan. Today, peace and quiet has returned to the region. The peoples of the Niger Delta no longer feel excluded from national leadership.
    When in December 1983 Major General Buhari led a military coup that toppled the democratically elected government of late Shehu Shagari, the nation welcomed a self proclaimed messiah. He ruled with an iron fist and wore a sad face. He wanted to instill discipline and curb corruption. Many politicians were jailed for several life times. Some citizens were executed for excusable misdemeanors. The state degenerated into a rogue terror squad that even staged a daring kidnap in the streets of London. Buhari flogged us with horsewhips for minor traffic infractions or as we queued for common grocery. Truthful journalists and honest judges were punished with long jail terms for doing their jobs. It was a relieved nation that welcomed Mr. Buhari’s toppling by his more humane colleagues in uniform. Buhari was briefly detained and later released.
    He went into political wilderness. Later, he insistently sought employment by vying to return to power as a democratic convert. In the lead on to the 2015 elections, the Nigerian nation unanimously granted Mr. Buhari political amnesty to contest as a free repentant citizen. Today, he is a second term elected president, cleansed of his past sins against us. Today’s Buhari presidency is therefore a product of our unusual national generosity, forgiveness and gracious magnanimity.
    Fifty years after the end of our civil war, the estrangement of the people of the South East from the mainstream of national political life is a national embarrassment. The marginalization is not just about infrastructure neglect. The landscape of the region still bears the tragic marks of war and desolation. A sense of real belonging in a nation is not reducible to highways, bridges and railway lines. It is not about token periodic appointments of citizens from the South East into federal offices to fulfill cosmetic constitutional requirements. That can be assumed by even the most plastic definition of citizenship.
    There is a deeper and more essential sense of alienation of the Igbos from the heart of Nigeria. It is the unwritten and unstated presumption that Nigeria can still not find it in its heart to forgive the Igbos for Biafra. On the part of the Igbos, a dangerous psychological alienation has taken root. The youth now feel that there is some sin committed by their elders that has alienated them from fully realizing the fruits of their Nigerian citizenship. For these people, there seems to be an invisible iron ceiling to their political and economic aspirations. It is beginning to look like an original sin, something that has become integral to the communal psychology of national life.
    Here lies the source of the resurgence of Biafra and other secessionist pressures in the region. These pressures are growing into a global torrent of agitations with a consistent message especially in the diaspora where the Igbo have massively fled in pursuit of self actualization. Among those arms of the national elite that have any conscience left, the systemic exclusion of the Igbo from the leadership equation in Nigeria has almost become a directive principle of an unscripted political code of conduct.
    Of course the politics of leadership supremacy in a multi ethnic nation state is competitive. The competition is made more fierce by the scramble for the allocation of scarce resources in a political economy that emphasizes entitlement over productivity. In that competitive framework, the immediate tasks for the Igbo political elite are many in the quest for pre eminence. The Igbo political elite has to reduce the habitual fears and nervousness of the competing political elite of other factions in the country. They need to assure the rest of Nigeria that entrusting them with presidential power will enhance the prospects of better governance and more productive leadership. Internally, the Igbo political elite must strike a consensus to avoid presenting Nigeria with multiple candidates. In a region where the political landscape is now dominated by all manner of scoundrels, the matter of a fit and proper candidate for responsible, modern and informed national leadership becomes paramount.
    In cultural terms, it is a question of “who shall we send and who will run our errand as the best possible ambassador to a feast at the national arena?” A good number of the political upstarts, miscreants and glorified illiterates thrown up by the present arrangements must self isolate and excuse themselves from the race for 2023 if indeed the option of a South East presidential candidate become real.
    Identity politics in a multinational state requires deft footwork. The most important ingredient for the Igbo to embark on this journey is first a willingness to negotiate with competing national elites and factions. As instinctive business people, deal making ought to be a major asset of the igbo. But there is a disturbing pride, arrogance and noisy ebullience in the Igbo character that can unsettle competitors. The Igbo hardly get on their knees to seek a favour. But negotiating for the Nigerian presidency will require a mixture of self assurance and pragmatic flexibility. When you go out to seek the lion’s share of what belongs to all, you go in meekness.
    To move from subordination to pre-eminence, a sense of realism is required. The Igbo now have a unique demographic limitation. The majority of the Igbo population do not live in the homeland. They form part of the voter population of the rest of the country. Being the single most dispersed ethnic group in the country, Igbos vote wherever they live in accordance with their economic and other interests. Diaspora voting is in Igbo interest. There may be more Igbo professionals based in Houston, Texas than in Lagos! The registered voter population in the five South Eastern states put together could be less than that of any two states in other less mobile parts of the country.
    Owing to a relatively higher degree of economic enlightenment among the Igbo population, the average Igbo family size has been shrinking in the last two decades. Pervasive Catholicism and high educational goals means that family sizes are down to an average of 5 (husband, wife and a maximum of three offspring). Divorce rate is low while high achievement motivation and age grade competition means that marriages are delayed in anticipation of economic fulfillment.
    The current political strategies among the South East political elite remain somewhat unwise. The sustained weaponization of Biafra may be strategically convenient. But using it to gain political concessions is a serious tactical blunder. You cannot frighten Nigeria with the force of mobs armed only with nostalgia except your preference is for mass suicide. It has led the Nigerian state to do the predictable: brand the Biafran agitation a terrorist movement and proceed to shoot, teargas and arrest innocent young men and women. Only Amnesty International has an idea of the fatalities from the pro-Biafra agitations in the last five years. The more the new breed Biafrans frighten people, the more the rest of Nigeria becomes jittery about the prospect of Igbo political ascendancy.
    The alternative of a well articulated and principled civil disobedience pressure movement has not been explored. We are yet to see a platform of South East professional and enlightened elements with a reasoned agenda for an alternative Nigeria. An agitation for a mere geo political power shift devoid of real content may be a gratuitous insult and a futile drama.
    We should however rise above sentimental and moralistic simplification. The dark forces that propel Nigeria’s bad political culture are not about to retire. Nor are the merchants of hate going on recess soon. Politics is mostly amoral and is by no means a love affair. The merchants of habitual vote rigging and demographic engineering will strive to vitiate the aims of the politics of moral merit.
    The proposition for an Igbo president is likely to be the most consequential subject in the 2023 election year. If it comes about, there will be consequences for Nigeria and the Igbos. If not, the consequences will be even more dire. If the proposition fails, Nigeria will carry the moral burden of continuing as a nation sustained on systemic injustice. For the Igbo, the challenge of the future will be that of being who they are but living in a nation that regards them perpetually as the ‘other’ Nigerians. But the long term Igbo interest will not be resolved by having one of their own as a tenant of Aso Rock Villa for 8 years. In the long run, the best way the Igbo can attain self actualization is to lose themselves in the Nigerian market place. In the process, they will eventually realize their best potentials as a formidable force in the context of a more diverse, inclusive, free market Nigeria.

  • Bad postcard from Bamako – Chidi Amuta

    Chidi Amuta

    On the 21st of March, 2012, mutinous soldiers of the Malian army invaded the Presidential Mansion in the capital city of Bamako. The mostly other rank soldiers were thrilled to burst into the luxury and opulence of the mansion. Their instant punishment for any unfortunate occupants they found in the place was merciless flogging with several strokes of horsewhip. The soldiers then proceeded to empty the refrigerators of expensive rare liquor before ransacking the kitchen for choice leftover presidential food. They then sank briefly into the pampering comfort of sumptuous presidential leather sofas while savouring their momentary opulence, a taste of the gravy of privilege and the spoils from the conquest of power.

    This earlier coup, like the recent one, began as a mutiny ostensibly in protest against the government’s handling of the Tuareg jihadist insurgency in the desert north of the country. The soldiers then proceeded to sack the government of Ahmadou Toumani Toure. Then as now, the coup was greeted with unanimous international condemnation and a barrage of sanctions, blockades and diplomatic lockouts. Concerted diplomatic squeeze led to negotiations between the coup leaders and ECOWAS which yielded an understanding that the coup leaders would hand back power to a transitional government in return for some form of amnesty. The ousted President was allowed to proceed on exile.

    Before then, the Tuareg insurgents had taken control of northern Mali and declared an independent nation of Azawad led by the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), a separatist movement that dates back to about 1916. The armed wing of the Tuareg insurgency is fuelled partly by returnees from the Libyan civil war and sundry Islamist movements in the Arab world, some inspired partly by the Arab Spring.

    Following a UN resolution and a formal invitation by the then interim government of Mali, the French intervened by launching “Operation Seval” in January 2013. The aim of the operation was to neutralize the threat of the rampaging Tuareg Islamist insurgents in the northern parts of the country. They had initiated a southward push to sack the government of the country. The French operation was part of an international effort to contain the spread of Islamist fundamentalist terrorism in the Sahel.

    Fast forward to 18th of August, 2020. Widespread protests and civil unrest over worsening economic conditions and bad governance produced widespread discontent. The spectre of growing insecurity from continuing threats from the Tuareg Islamists in the north in the country worsened a bad political situation.

    Another set of mutineers from a wing of the Malian army from a base in the small town of Kati invaded the capital city of Bamako and stormed the presidential palace. They arrested and detained the President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and the Prime Minister Boubou Cisse with key government officials. The government was forced to resign. The protesting mobs jubilated in the streets. A coup was completed with Col. Assimi Goita emerging as head of the new junta. Both the political opposition and the leaders of the civil unrest have welcomes the coup. No one knows whether there is a collaboration between the coup leaders and the opposition elements.

    International condemnation and sanctions have followed. Mali has been suspended from the African Union while ECOWAS has imposed a land and air blockade of the country. The United States has suspended military training and assistance. ECOWAS has sent in a negotiating team headed by former Nigerian President, Goodluck Jonathan. It is only likely that the soldiers will negotiate everything except their hold on power and the duration of their tenure.

    The new coup in Mali is a replay of a familiar African script. Insecurity has bred bad politics. Political instability has in turn opened the door for ambitious soldiers to topple democracy at a bad time and in a dangerous place. The sad truth is that fragile democracies cannot in and of themselves protect themselves from the forces that bad politics and atrocious governance unleash.

    Sadly, the ripples of the drama in Bamako will not stop in Mali. A host of regional security issues have been come to the fore. First is the future of democracy in vulnerable places where bad governance and unsettled national questions inevitably endanger national security. Second is the security of the nations sharing the Sahel against the strategic peril posed by the geo political relocation of international terrorism to the Sahel.

    The long standing conflict between the Tuaregs in the north of Mali and political factions in the southern half of the country has remained intractable for decades. Mali’s geographical location as a gateway between North Africa and the Sahel make the strategic implications somewhat compelling and treacherous. Local Islamist jihadists have mixed freely with fundamentalist terrorists from North Africa and the Arab world from where they have been routed by concerted Western pressure. Instability has also made Mali a hot highway for illicit trade in drugs and human beings seeking a safe corridor to Europe.

    Malian politics has been infiltrated by these contending forces. The jihadists have embedded themselves into the partisan divides of the country. Assorted Islamist fundamentalist groups have sheltered into the equation. The political opposition now includes jihadist elements seeking a bigger voice in the government.

    It is doubtful if a government assailed on all sides with sectarian and political turmoil can deliver good governance to avert the kind of civil unrest that quickened the latest coup. Most tragically, the politicians in Mali have failed to strengthen the apparatus of state security over these years. Consequently, the periodic easy invasions of the centres of power and authority cannot be a credit to any credible concept of state security.

    The fragile state of Mali’s national security has major regional and international security implications. Mali is central to the Sahel which is a continuum with the entire West Africa. This zone has also become the festering ground for the renegade formations of Al Queda, ISIS and now ISWAP. These terror groups having been routed in Europe and most of the Arab world have become more active in West Africa up to Nigeria where Boko Haram has remained a major threat for over a decade. Countries as far afield as Senegal, Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad and Cameroun have all been targeted by the terrorists.

    It is good that ECOWAS has initiated a mechanism for some resolution. Coaxing the soldiers to leave the comfort of the presidential mansion and return to the barracks may not be so easy. Forging a platform of common national commitment between the Tuaregs and the rest of the political factions in Mali may be the real challenge. Even more daunting would be how to dissuade the more militant wing of the islamists in northern Mali to disconnect from their patrons in the larger Arab jihadist formations.

    For us in Nigeria, the development in Mali has an urgent resonance. We have unresolved internal security challenges. We have since adopted a strategy of involving the military in internal security operations. Increasingly, the insurgency in the North East is becoming institutionalized. It could acquire political coloration over time. They have attempted an assassination of the Governor of Borno state. They had previously tried establishing a caliphate spanning the border areas between Nigeria, Chad and Cameroun. There are unproven allegations of complicity between active politicians and elements of the insurgents. There have also been charges of sabotage of operations by elements in the security forces. These problems further complicate Nigeria’s internal security nightmare. Mali has shown that where insecurity and instability persist, incompetent governments no matter their military backing are a danger to national security and democracy itself. That incidentally is the postcard from Bamako to Abuja.

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    ‘Animal Farm’ at 75:
    Art and Enduring Political Purpose

    On 17th of August, 1945, Penguin Books published “Animal Farm”, the classic political satire by George Orwell (real name: Eric Arthur Blair). Initially intended as an anti Stalinist satire to dissuade Europeans from embracing Stalinist totalitarianism, Orwell’s slim ‘fairy tale’ has gained wide acceptance among the English speaking readership and in homes, libraries and school curricular in over 70 languages around the world. Orwell, who was himself a social democrat, was mortally petrified by the prospects of the spread of revolutionary absolutism, bloody dictatorship and upheaval in Europe especially in Britain.

    For the last 75 years, ‘Animal Farm’ has cemented its position as one of the most remarkable literary events of the last century. It remains an undying political allegory of universal appeal and enduring contemporary resonance. Not even Orwell’s other much celebrated futuristic and prophetic novel, “1984”, has found nearly as much popular appeal and contemporary relevance.

    Thus, wherever revolutions have occurred and self imploded, wherever the heroes of revolutionary disruption have turned the sword of subterfuge against each other, wherever the promises of messianic political change have turned into ashes of disappointment and mass betrayal, ‘Animal Farm’ has found meaning as a literary paradigm of human political behavior and experience. To the extent that such tragic reversals remain a permanent feature of politics and human behavior, the appeal of this otherwise simple animal fable has endured with recurrent freshness and troubling echoes.

    Since after reading ‘Animal Farm’ as a high school junior in 1966, I have found myself repeatedly returning to the tiny novel ever so often. As a matter of personal choice and habit, each time any of my children began reading, I would instinctively gift them two books as primers: George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ and Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’. My aim has been to prepare them in advance for two basic experiences that will recur in their future lives. The first is the ever present reality that every political change usually carries in its womb the seeds of its own reversal. The second is the inevitability of change as the only permanent thing in the world, be it political, cultural or indeed technological. As a teacher, I always included “Animal Farm” in reading lists for courses in ‘Literature and Politics’ or, for that matter, as textual matter for graduate courses in ‘Literary Theory’ or ‘Literature and Society’.

    Ordinarily, a simple imaginative recreation of an animal fable should not graduate beyond bed side entertainment or, at best, a reading primer for young adolescents. “Animal Farm” fulfills both functions and rises to loftier heights. It is a revolt among animals in an English countryside farm. The animals in the farm, led by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball mobilize the rest for a violent revolt against Mr. Jones, a countryside farm owner. The revolt succeeds in chasing off the unsuspecting Mr. Jones and his family, thereby ending an era of ostensible human exploitation and ushering in a regime of government of animals by animals for animals with the memorable hilarious moto: “Two legs bad, four legs good”!

    Soon enough, supplies run thin as the capacity of the animals to run the farm diminishes, leading to unavoidable hunger and widespread discontent. The totalitarian Napoleon deploys the wily propaganda skills of Squeler, a gifted propagandist to disinform and misinform the animals while justifying every act of the ruling oligarchy of pigs. The height of this propaganda blitz is the subversion of the original anthem of the revolt: “All Animals Are Equal” by a crafty emendation: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others”. Soon enough, an oligarchy of pigs emerges with an entitlement to the good things with all the vices and excesses of the discredited humans.

    Soon enough, Snowball overthrows Napoleon and the vanguard of animals spawns an opposition camp of silent malcontents. Devotees of the toppled Napoleon are routinely liquidated while widespread disillusionment among the animal population erodes and subverts the original ‘revolutionary’ fervor. In the end, the elite regime of pigs invites representatives of humans to an event that resembles a banquet and perhaps a disguised rehearsal for handing back the farm to human management. At the climactic moment, the other animals look in through the window. “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

    This simple allegory which Orwell insisted on calling a ‘fairy tale’ captures the historical twists and turns of great revolutions and even the reversals in partisan democratic political changes of baton. The Bolshevik revolution bred the great purges of revolutionary ‘fellow travellers’ under Stalin and later led to the rise of a privileged communist elite class that lived in luxurious dachas in the suburban outskirts of Moscow. Similarly, the Chinese revolution under Mao Tse Tung produced the unintended rise of the infamous Gang of Four and the serial abuses and corruption that led to their subsequent purge in the post Mao era.

    Elsewhere in the world where the adoption of leftist ideologies led to popular revolutions, there would seem to be a bit of the wisdom of ‘Animal Farm’ in the subsequent tragic reversals of the original revolutionary ideals. In Venezuela, the populist autocracy of Hugo Chavez and his comrades literally crippled the economy of one of the world’s potentially richest countries and sent millions of impoverished citizens into the streets literally with begging bowls. It is only perhaps in Cuba that the original revolutionary ideals and spartan discipline of Fidel Castro and his successors was never substantially diluted, leading to the survival of Cuba today as easily the most credible surviving vindication of socialist progress and humanism.

    In Africa, the radical revolutionary model bred mostly unmitigated disasters of tectonic proportions. Ethiopia under Haile Megistu Mariam yielded a huge harvest of empty leftist sloganeering and the unmitigated disaster of famine and hunger that made Ethiopia the poster child of global hunger and charity. In Benin Republic, Mathew Kerekou further impoverished the people of the tiny West African nation while crushing all opposition and muzzling all dissent. In the poor land locked state of Burkina Faso, the honest revolutionary zeal of the youthful Thomas Sankara was cut short by the bloody subterfuge of his assumed comrade and fellow traveler, Blaise Compoare, who ended up subverting all the ideals of the original putsch and handing back the country to the ogres of capitalist exploitation.

    The applicability of the “Animal Farm”paradigm to the politics of contemporary Africa is not restricted to failed leftist revolutionary episodes. The bane of the multi party democratic experience in Africa has been the gap between the promises of successive politicians and the serial failure to meet the expectations of the people. To that extent, the paradigm is as relevant to Stalinist Russia of the 1920s as it is to today’s Nigeria where Mr. Buhari’s promise of positive change has turned into an ash heap of failed hopes, frustrated dreams and insecure lives.

     Books of the Week:

    1. Anne Applebaum- Twilight of Democracy:The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

    2. Isabel Wilkerson – Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent