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Chidi Amuta

  • 2023: Igbos and the Politics of Moral Consequence – Chidi Amuta

    2023: Igbos and the Politics of Moral Consequence – Chidi Amuta

    By 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 geopolitical 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 direction 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”

  • Season of Firefights – Chidi Amuta

    Season of Firefights – Chidi Amuta

    Chidi Amuta

    In the clear absence of a grand vision, big issues or any inspirational undertakings, President Buhari may be condemned to spending the remaining part of his tenure supervising sporadic firefights among his cast. Family members, regime pontiffs, political devotees and highly privileged officials of state are all likely to get embroiled in imminent fights over influence and treasure. The presidential ears may in the next two years be occasionally deafened by the cacophony of either domestic quarrels or loud noises among squabbling big hirelings at the corridors of power who seek to magnify their importance or announce their sheer presence.

    An ancient law of primitive courtly power may be unfolding in Abuja. When disparate interests and persons are brought together in a place of power merely to indulge in its opiate or satiate in its narcotic trappings, they usually have a tendency to break out in occasional loud disagreements and foolish turf fights. Similarly, if a sovereign fails to create active engagements for his followers and prefects, he may find out that his power and authority are cannibalized among feuding ambitious lieutenants. The public gets engrossed in the drama of these fights and soon forgets that there was ever a king on the throne. The regime degenerates into a chronicle of rivalries and avoidable firefights. Going by the number and frequency of recent firefights in and around the Buhari presidency, we may well be in a season of defining engagements and terminal ambushes.

    In the domestic front, the Buhari clan may have already set a national record in the frequency of its open altercations, rancorous exchanges and unguarded utterances. Several open quarrels in the precincts of the Presidential mansion itself have been reported and dramatized in the social media. Villa spinners are yet to deny any one of these uproars. As a matter of fact, the social media has in the recent past captured open shouts, name calling and domestic turf wars inside the private confines of the First Residence. A few weeks back and again for the first time in our national history, differences between the First Lady’s security staff and sundry officials of the presidency degenerated into an open exchange of gunfire between factions of security personal deployed to guard the presidential villa and its inhabitants. Wild media reports on this worrisome episode were casually confirmed by Aso Rock spokespersons with hardly any room for respectable spin add-ons. As a consequence, the police had to intervene and arrest the errant highly placed miscreants. Subsequently, there was a mass reorganization of the security personal in the Villa.

    It was hard to hide the overwhelming national security concerns over this incident. The concerns ranged from the personal security of the president to the safety of the inhabitants of the nation’s pre-eminent and most strategic real estate. The complex that houses the residence and offices of the president of the federal republic of Nigeria is not exactly the best location for undisciplined and poorly trained security personnel to practice their weapons skills. (Imagine factions of the US Secret Service exchanging gunfire in the precincts of the White House!) Not to talk of the unflattering testimonial of a first family that cannot muster the restraint to manage their differences and curb the excesses of their handlers. The nation expects that the President should minimally be able to manage his household to avoid such ugly incidents. His predecessors did so without embarrassing the nation.

    At the level of the machinery of government, some tension is becoming noticeable between the executive and the legislature. The presumed amity and accord between the two branches since the advent of the president’s second term would seem to be coming under some stress. The preponderance of the ruling APC in the two houses of the legislature may not help much in the months running up to the 2023 succession political battles. As the succession time frame gets shorter, the financial stakes of political positions will get higher. The fights will become more fierce and party loyalty will take a back seat. The banners are already up.

    In the last couple of days, for instance, the Minster of State for Labour, Mr. Festus Keyamo, has been locked in a public relations firefight with the National Assembly. At issue is the implementation of a token 774,000 jobs meant as Covid-19 employment palliative for 1000 unemployed youth in each of our 774 local governments. Ostensibly, Mr. Keyamo, a known lover of publicist noise making and grand standing wants to protect the public works programme from the usual influence peddling of politicians. The legislators want to hide under their oversight cloak to insist that the programme is best handled by a statutory agency of government, namely the National Directorate of Employment (NDE). The issue remains unresolved up to this moment.

    The question of right and wrong on this matter is only a moot point. What seems to be happening is a clash of bloated egos and political self interests. Mr. Keyamo has no right to treat the public works programme as a personal platform for sanctimonious posturing in derogation of the National Assembly in its normal order of duty. Similarly, the National Assembly should not hold the junior minister to ransom on a matter of wide national interest with direct implications for the livelihood of many desperate Nigerian youth. All the National Assembly is required to do is to insist that the Ministry of Labour adheres to due process in filling the positions. So, here is one needless turf war which seems to have raged because the warring parties may be blinded by narrow interests. While it rages, the senior Minister of Labour, Mr. Chris Ngige, is himself embroiled in another fight over his handling of the budget of the National Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF).

    At the level of the ruling party, there is a smouldering cauldron of subdued firefights. Almost caught in a cross fire between Mr. Oshiomole and his multiple traducers, the president was pressured into hosting the National Executive Committee meeting of the battle torn party in the council chambers of the presidential Villa. To wit, he got the Attorney General of the federation to swear in the Caretaker Committee of a party on the excuse that he won an election and therefore is entitled to use the resources and facilities of the nation to advance his narrow partisan interests.

    Even then, his intervention which was designed to restore unity and sanity to the party has merely driven the revolt and its foot soldiers underground. Soon after the Edo and Ondo elections, the dogs of war will spring back into an active open confrontation mode. The fights for the soul of a post Buhari APC will resume in the various states where the president and his Abuja politicians remain light on the ground. In the political battles that lie ahead, the Buhari influence will increasingly become less consequential as 2023 gets nearer. The party will likely splinter into vicious warring tribes and antagonistic factions under the command and control of the many political war lords in waiting. This stage of the skirmish has vicariously fingered Mr. Bola Tinubu as the first target of the post Buhari cavalry. Others will follow shortly.

    At the national geo political level, a most unexpected fight has recently reared its head from a most unexpected quarter. A few weeks back, there was an incendiary verbal exchange between Aso Rock presidential spokes persons and various Northern interest groups. Specifically, the Northern Elders Forum and the Arewa Consultative Forum respectively had issued statements declaring increasing loss of confidence in the Buhari administration as well as the various governors of northern states over the worsening insecurity in the region as well as sundry issues like youth unemployment. Aso Rock retorted by questioning the status of the leaders of these groups. The North is after all the president’s presumed core political base. The conundrum is that among the southern elite, the Buhari administration is seen as divisive and parochial on account of the excessive lopsidedness of its appointments and projects patronage in favour of the northern half of the coutry. As the politics of Buhari’s succession gathers steam, we should expect greater pressure from northern groups who already have begun to argue that Buhari may not have been the best news for the northern interest. When this line of argument intensifies, it will be hard to distil its altruism from its hidden political intent.

    By far the most strategic firefight in the life of the Buhari administration may be the one currently raging around the leadership of the EFCC. The former chairman of the agency, Mr. Ibrahim Magu, has been undergoing interrogations before a presidential investigation panel right in Aso Villa. The speculative allegations schedule reads more like a telephone directory indicating that Mr. Magu may have commandeered some of the proceeds of his anti corruption war for himself. An unimaginable quantum of cash and serial properties are also alleged to have changed illegal hands with Magu’s knowledge. No one knows the boundary line between fact and fiction in these wild speculations. Until the exact charges are made public or adduced in an anticipated court outing, the allegations against Mr. Magu will remain conjectural. What is indisputable however is that there must be something to warrant the drama of an elaborate presidential inquiry.

    In the interim, it is only proper that Mr. Magu has been made to step aside in order that the investigation proceeds unfettered. The president can only spare himself the nasty politics of this affair by a strict adherence to the rule of law. Of course it will remain a matter of grave concern that a public officer on whose shoulder a major plank of the president’s mandate hangs should be the subject of an elaborate criminal investigation in the first place. What remains hard to understand is how a president who made anti corruption the major pillar of his campaign from 2015 should allow an officer with Magu’s alleged character defects to preside over the EFCC in the first place.

    However, we need to locate the curiosity of the EFCC as an agency of government in some historical perspective in order to determine the altruism of the present drama. From inception, the EFCC has been used as an instrument of political odd jobs by incumbent presidents. Obasanjo deployed it against state governors who did not align with his political machinations including the third term infamy. People like Mike Adenuga, Peter Odili, Rotimi Amaechi, Fayose, Ibrahim Babangida, the late Alamieseigha and others were victims of a politically weaponized EFCC.

    Similarly, the late president Yar’dua used the EFCC to advance his cause. Former EFCC chairman Nuhu Ribadu was demoted, harassed and haunted until he went into self exile after what was obviously an illustrious career. Thereafter, regime friends like James Ibori and Bukola Saraki who were close to Mr. Yar’dua became the undertakers of the EFCC and had a hand in the appointment of Farida Waziri as Chairperson.

    In similar vein, when Farida Waziri would not play ball with President Jonathan, she was eased out to be replaced by Lamorde who had been Nuhu Ribadu’s Director of Operations in Lagos. Lamorde became chairman and subsequently left in circumstances similar to what is happening to Mr. Magu now. An unprintable catalogue of corrupt events was leveled against him. Not much was heard of Lamorde and the corruption charges against him afterwards. I understand he is currently at the very top of the police hierarchy in Abuja.

    In all of this, it is clear that the EFCC has been left as a hybrid government agency, something to be cited in search of transparency and also to be deployed against political adversaries by an incumbent president as occasion demands. At no time has the Act establishing the EFCC been implemented fully. The agency is supposed to have a governing board that ought to authorize the actions of the chairman. Membership of the board includes the Governor of the CBN, the Inspector General of the Police, an official of the Ministry of Finance etc. Nigerians may need to ask why this board has never been inaugurated from President Obasanjo till today. It has only been convenient for successive presidents to appoint the EFCC chairman and leave him without a board to be used for political ends or fired when those ends change.

    In fairness to the embattled Magu, he had a mixture of a dramatic and public relations approach to the anti corruption crusade. He may not have been the most intellectually inclined or the most articulate public officer in these parts. But he had the training of an accountant who also happened to be an effective police officer. He had a nose for sniffing out big criminals with dodgy book keeping records and cooked up figures.

    In the immediate post election campaigns in 2015-16, Mr. Magu’s EFCC regaled the public with dossiers of the corrupt activities of mostly the leadership of the just defeated PDP, A number of them were named, shamed, investigated, charged to court and even tried. An avalanche of convictions and plea bargains followed. Troves of cash and a long list of properties were reportedly recovered. Gradually the steam went out of the EFCC crusade. Thereafter, Mr. Magu began a series of trials of and convictions of those accused of corruption in the media.

    In the chamber schemes that built up to the present travail of Mr. Magu, the Attorney General has featured as an arrow head who is officially positioned to cast the lethal death stone. But we need to watch out for where Malami is coming from politically. I smell political bad manners in this whole thing going by the configuration of political interests in the Villa. . It may be that Mr. Magu cannot be relied upon to nail whoever the commanding faction has identified as the imminent political threat to their scheme in the post Buhari equation. I would have a champagne just to be proved wrong on this speculation.

    Certainly, the end season firefights will not end with the stampede around Mr. Magu’s rowdy goodbye. The stakes are rather high. The contradictions inside the Buhari administration are far too many to guarantee a quiet end of tenure season. In addition, the collective is too disparate and devoid of a unifying agenda. Even worse, the president himself is too remote and distant to be perceived as being in charge. His presence is defined mostly by a certain absence, a worrying vacancy in a place of great power. As the public keeps asking ‘Who is in charge here?”, the likelihood of even more severe firefights increases by the day. A cult with many devotees and no creed is bound to explode into a diversity of denominations with multiple tongues.

  • Pandemonium at the Altar – Chidi Amuta

    By Chidi Amuta

    Nigeria’s tradition of unruly political behaviour has begun rehearsing for a major roadshow well ahead of the 2023 open display. Suddenly, the ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), has erupted in a crisis long foretold. The daggers are out. The targets are marked. And the lines of the imminent engagement are clear.

    Between 8 am and the close of work last Wednesday, 17th June, the APC had a total of five pretenders to the office of National Chairman. There was Mr. Adams Oshiomhole, the rascally trade unionist whose tenure had been the subject of vicious litigations and open political wrestling for quite some time. He was the previous day suspended from office by an Abuja High Court. Immediately after the court ruling, lawyers to his legal opponent, my good friend Mr. Victor Giadom, declared Giadom the lawful acting National Chairman.

    In response, the party secretariat quickly declared ex- Oyo State Governor and substantive Deputy National Chairman (South) Mr. Abiola Ajimobi as acting National Chairman. Since Mr. Abiola Ajimobi is hospitalized for Covid-19, the party secretariat again quickly declared a certain Mr. Shuaibu Lawal, Deputy National Chairman (North) as acting National Chairman, ostensibly to act for Ajimobi. Later on the same day, the National Working Committee (NWC) of the party met and settled for a different acting National Chairman, Prince Hilliard Etta. after firing Mr. Giadom from his substantive position as Deputy National Secretary, a position which he held before heading to court against Mr. Adams Oshiomole. Mr. Giadom’s lawyers returned to court the following day and got a more definitive affirmation of his stake for the throne.

    The pretenders to the prime office of party Chairman geared up in earnest and began acting out their scripts and in the process revealing the direction of their plot. Contradictory orders and instructions began flying around, compounding the confusion in the beleaguered party. Mr. Giadom quickly nullified the disqualification of Edo Governor, Mr. Godwin Obaseki, previously effected by Mr. Oshiomole. With these untidy developments, the only position in the party that seems certain is that of Party Leader which is statutorily vested in the President. Even that position is open to contentious semantics as Mr. Bola Tinubu, chief political entrepreneur of Lagos and the South West is frequently referred to as ‘ national leader’ of APC! As things stand, the stage may be set for a timed implosion of the ruling party.

    The possibility that party leaders will seek a political solution is hot on the cards if only to save the ruling party from continuing embarrassment. While the legal complications may yet deepen and make a political resolution more burdensome, the possibility that these developments could hasten the unraveling of the party ought to concern its leadership.

    The pretensions to legal technicality by the contenders in the present crisis is of tangential consequence. Mr. Oshiomole’s plight as National Chairman is only important to the extent that it either inhibits or promotes the prospect of a predetermined successor to Mr, Buhari. Similarly, the fate of Mr. Godwin Obaseki as a second term governor of Edo State is important only to the extent that it increases or whittles the political significance of Mr. Oshiomole in both the state and at the national level. Otherwise both Mr. Oshiomole and Mr. Obaseki are mere pawns in a larger game of national political supremacy in the post Buhari era.

    What is of utmost importance at this point is control of the party at the national level for the giant ambitions at stake. Conspicuously on display is a dress rehearsal of the post Buhari politics within the APC. The forces in ambush are the hidden hands of the drivers of the factions in the power calculus. What is at stake is political primacy and pre-eminence in Nigeria AB- (After Buhari).

    We may, therefore, be on the threshold of an unraveling foretold. The forces of this unraveling are inherent in the origins and nature of the APC as a party. The party was never an organic party in the sense of arising out of a bottom up mass movement that acquired form and structure to evolve into a political party. It was instead first and foremost an untidy assemblage of divergent interests with the single focus of wresting federal power from Mr. Jonathan and the then crumbling PDP behemoth. What united and powered the coalition that produced the APC was a greedy opposition to a continuation of the Jonathan presidency.

    We must concede the political necessity, expediency and legitimacy of the coalition that produced the party. In a diverse polity such as ours with sharp divisions along religious, geo ethnic, and geographical lines, any political organization that would command a national followership must of necessity be a negotiated coalition of diverse interests. The history of opposition coalitions especially in Africa is that they are necessary if democracy is to produce a peaceful transition of power from one party to the other. That in fairness is the greatest achievement of the APC in the history of Nigerian party politics.

    Beyond that, however, this contingent advantage was not in and of itself enough to birth a serious political party. The first flaw of the APC was that it defined itself mostly by default. Not wanting to be a replica of the PDP did not amount to an identity for a serious political party. Nigerians expected a popular movement founded on solid ideas and programmes as a counterweight to the nationalist right of centre inclinations of the PDP. The leadership of the APC probably understood the hazy ideological message in adopting a loosely defined national progressive democratic identity at least in name. Nigerians possibly desired a more left of centre alternative but the leaders of the APC gave us a makeshift platform for power grabbing and fault finding. It was not a popular movement nor was it a meeting of political minds. It was an all comers machinery for contesting a presidential election to wrest power from an effete incumbent.

    It had no agenda for ruling Nigeria, no clear policy departure from the incumbent and its leading lights were roughly the same people that ran the PDP aground now defined only by the fact that they were no longer in the PDP. At the onset, the APC was uncertain of victory and mostly prepared for a long series of legal challenges to an envisaged Jonathan prevalence. Victory came to the APC as a destabilizing surprise and it has never recovered from that dizzying surprise. That is why it spent the first term of four years blaming the government it succeeded while groping almost foolishly for a governance direction of its own.

    While struggling pitifully with the practical challenges of governance, the APC has never risen to the occasion of transforming into a real party nor of ruling Nigeria as a coherent political alternative. Instead, it started out as a personalized cultic movement built around the receding myth of Mr. Buhari as something of a national ethical messiah whose presumptive personal discipline would translate into national renewal and redemption. His choice of a poor ascetic life style was being juxtaposed to the decadent bourgeois indulgences of the worst of the PDP elite at the height of their infamous rule.

    As a matter of fact, the alliance that gave birth to the APC was cobbled around the famed cultic followership of Mr. Buhari. In a sense, Buhari was adopted more as a collective partisan mascot and symbol for marketing an alternative to Mr. Jonathan. From a purely marketing perspective, Jonathan was clearly no match for the myth and mystique of Mr. Buhari.

    The APC was a cult of Buhari devotees from the onset but one without a creed, a cult of confused devotees devoid of ideology. As a party, it hardy had principles, discipline, methodology or policy focus. It failed as a mechanism of national mobilization and an instrument of responsible governance. Instead, the lack of party discipline and an organizing principle for the control of federal power has allowed the APC to degenerate quickly into a vehicle for the enthronement of a sectional hegemony and the resuscitation of primordial geo ethnic loyalties.

    The president who was courted by a faction of the political elite as a mascot for capturing national power has himself re-hijacked national power to the discomfiture of both party and nation. His overt nativism has emerged in the indecent lopsidedness in the staffing of key federal appointments to power centres in favour of the northern muslim half of the country. In deference to the support of the South West, Mr, Buhari has extended token gestures like the symbolic political canonization of Chief Abiola by renaming the national Democracy Day after June 12. Both the incongruities in the party and the anomalies in the conducts of the Buhari presidency have exposed the weaknesses in the original power template of the APC.

    In the process of wielding national power over the past five years, the weaknesses of the APC have emerged. In addition to the geo political lopsidedness in appointments at the centre, key leaders of the formations in the original coalition have become estranged. The Bukola Saraki wing has been excluded. The Tinubu and South West wing is divided and on life support. The New PDP wing is badly factionalized as well. The entire APC leadership support base has jettisoned the partisan affiliations that made the alliance possible and is now divided along the lines of personal loyalty to the president. The impending exist of the president in 2023 is likely to divide the party even further along this fault line. It is expedient for key elements to pledge allegiance to continuing along a possible Buhari legacy and use that as a platform to angle for supremacy in the party. I doubt that this gimmick will impress Mr. Buhari whose sense of mission seems to begin and end with his own incumbency. Even now, Mr. Buhari’s clout in terms of control of the party has been variously and repeatedly wanting. He could not wield his influence to place the APC on the ballot in both Zamfara and Rivers states in the last general elections.

    Now that the Buhari transition has been fast forwarded by three years, the internal contradictions of the party in power have surfaced to haunt the party as a party. Forget that governance and the common good at the national and most state levels will begin to take a back seat. The present skirmishes are merely rehearsals of the bloody wars that will be fought in the party to succeed Mr. Buhari. The factors and factions in contention counterbalance themselves and may cancel each other out at the expense of the party itself. The single most important feature of the party that will hasten its unraveling is perhaps the fact that its leading elite are persons of near equal age, resources and political gravity. The possibility that they will cancel each other out while entertaining the nation in the law courts remains the most interesting prospect in the political drama of the future of the APC.

    For a non- partisan observer, however, the plight of the APC is above the skirmishes around Mr. Oshiomole’s disappearing relevance and job. The real concern is above the narrow confines of the party. It is a matter of grave national concern, almost rising to the level of a national security threat . Whatever our misgivings about the party and its inner workings, it remains the ruling party and therefore the source of the key custodians of our national sovereignty. The occupants and operatives of the federal government and a majority of the states are products of the ruling party. To that extent, what irks the party ought to be of strategic concern to all Nigerians.

    For a ruling party, the silly drama around the office of APC national chairman is disgraceful and a shameful display of cynical irresponsibility and insensitivity to the plight of the nation over which they preside. The nation is today in dire need of leadership and beset with problems that are urgent and existential. We are in the midst of a dangerous pandemic. Our economic life support machine by way of the oil industry is fatally injured. Our insecurity is worsening just as our inequality indices have become globally acknowledged. Yet the ruling party is not squabbling over the best strategies to dig the nation out of these deep holes or deal with these existential threats.

    This APC show of shame is not about how best to check the spread of Covid-19. It is not about how to cope with an economy with a debt to revenue ratio of close to 99%. The quarrel is not about how to curb an epidemic of poverty that had 100 million Nigerians submerged before the covid-19 emergency and is likely to climb to 120 million in the post covid-19 months. This APC crisis is not even about how to ameliorate the impending loss of over 40 million jobs as a result of the covid-19 lockdowns and disruptions. The APC leaders are not disagreeing about the virtual collapse of the university system in which our scholars spend more time on strike than in the classrooms, laboratories and libraries. This squabble is not about how to find a lasting solution to the industrial scale killings in parts of the country or how to end the Boko Haram and other insurgencies in parts of the country. This is all about the personal ambition of a few party elite.

    It is of course healthy to have disagreements and differences of views in a political party. It is in fact an imperative of a healthy democracy that there should be differences of views on key national issues among the elite of the ruling party or other parties in contention for national leadership.

    The expectation that the rival Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) would fare better is unfounded. Sixteen years of institutional existence and power incumbency has not translated into either a superiority of organization or perspective. Even now as an opposition, the PDP has remained frozen at the level of abuse and personal insult. It has hardly risen to the occasion of positing a logical ideological or policy alternative to the ruling party. Its leadership has not grown neither has its internal democracy or party technocracy. It has remains at the same level of pedestrian and mundane opportunism and indiscriminate brandishing of titles and changing postures.

    Clearly then, our democracy remains endangered more because the party architecture on which it is founded is in the vice grip of a cynical tribal elite that is preoccupied with power for its own sake and not as an instrument of service to the national community.

    *Chidi Amuta is a member of TNG’s editorial advisory board*

  • Power and Sovereignty in the Virtual Republic, By Chidi Amuta

    Chidi Amuta

    Nations tend to change course at the prompting of crises and major disruptions. As things stand, a viral eruption from a small seafood market in provincial China may have defined the kick off point for a new direction for significant nations of the world. We may now have to re-calibrate 21st century world history as the pre and post Covid-19 eras. Even before the lockdowns are completely lifted, the new race may have begun.

    Among policy analysts and speculators, worrying and projecting about a post covid-19 world is gathering steam as a new obsession. On the inevitable direction that the world is likely to follow, an interim consensus has already emerged. Simply put, the virtual world of digital everything will spread like a new virus to swamp government, business and social life. In that imminent digital world of universal virtualness, nations will find their positions within a hierarchy of competence defined by know how and know why.

    Already, the digital world has given us virtual offices that enable people to work from home, banks that move trillions of dollars across impossible distances through unseen channels and hospitals that conduct diagnoses of complex ailments and deliver prescriptions online. There are now lively consequential meetings between business partners who have never met themselves before. Even social life is not exempt from the digital onslaught to bridge distance through virtual arrangements. Online concerts link up famous artists across thousands of miles to deliver exhilarating performances while Netflix multiplies our menu of blockbuster movies streamed into devices in our palms. Amazon delivers our choice of urgent goods and supplies at the doorway after the click of a mere button.

    Covid-19 has further accelerated the speed of these changes. Because of the constraints of physical contact and social distancing, existing digital platforms have made giant strides in virtual communication. The Zoom application has quickly metamorphosed into a global platform for meetings and conferences. While Boris Johnson was in hospital battling an infection of Covid-19, for instance, the British House of Commons was in session via Zoom and holding full parliamentary debates.

    Even the reign of television as we have come to know it is under threat. Global social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook are fast integrating data, voice and video to a point where you can now hold an interview, a birthday party, a public execution, suicide bombing or sexual orgy on live stream and broadcast same to an unsuspecting world wide audience. If you run your business live on Instagram, you become the literal owner of a temporary virtual television channel that people can click on to and watch endlessly. It is only the censorial alertness of the IT platform operatives that can limit the more damaging images from such universal channels.

    Gradually, the power of a different tribe of entrepreneurs is creeping in to disrupt traditional axis of power. We know the tribe whose uniforms has been the pin stripe suits of Wall Street. Now, we have the youthful genius in jeans and t-shirt or the ageing extra smart CEO in turtle neck, jeans and trainers (a la Steve Jobs)presiding over a multi billion dollar corporation and with a hold on the minds and fortunes of billions of enthralled humanity. The US congress had to subpoena Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook when it got entangled with Russia’s massive hack of the 2016 US presidential elections. Most of the Congress men and women never understood what the young lad was saying about algorithms, remote servers, privacy protocols and subscriber density.

    Covid-19 has merely accelerated a trend that had been building up in the last two decades and half. An incremental loss of weight has been the defining feature of important things especially in the post industrial era. The objects and ideas through which technology has been altering our reality are either light weight or even intangible. The world wide web, the internet, optical fibre cables and the computer chips driving the coming Artificial Intelligence(AI) revolution are all literally weightless.

    There is consequently a new reality of international trade defined by a law of inverse value: weight loss with increased value. Small electronic components that can alter reality are being transported easily by air across borders and barriers. Paradoxically, the most powerful single goods in today’s world, computer chips, are made from the most common and universally available material on earth, perhaps next only to the air we breathe: sand. The control of intangible human intellect over weightless matter has produced by far the greatest social transformations and wealth in human history.

    This is in contrast with the essence and products of the industrial revolution which for the first time powered humanity’s transition from primitive hunter/forager to modern industrial producer. Heavy things like the printing press, the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, blast furnaces rolled into place to put at our disposal equally heavy stuff like steam locomotives travelling on steel and stone railroads, printing presses, automobiles running on concrete and bituminous motorways. Writes Alan Greenspan, former US Federal Reserve chairman, ‘In 1900, economic value was created … by moving iron ore by rail from the Mesabi Range to Pittsburg where it was joined with coal to make steel’. Today, on the contrary, economic value is created by moving data and analyses to and fro around the world electronically.

    Markets are no longer physical geographic places but a flood of data exchanged and stored in millions of computers across the world. Money and ideas are constantly streaming across all known barriers with consequences that often lead to international nerve wracking, exchange of diplomatic bad language and tension across international boundaries. Exchange of hostile data can even lead to war. The value of the naira in your pocket is determined by a vast exchange of data and information completely outside your control. It is the exchange of such data between computers in Texas, Riyadh, Moscow and London that determines the price of a barrel of crude oil extracted from the backyard of the hapless fisherman in Oloibiri. That in turn determines how much the government in Abuja will budget for schools, roads, railroads or hundreds of SUVs for unproductive legislators.

    The imminent explosion of the digital takeover of our lives has vast implications for governments, politics and sovereign power. For Nigeria, the challenge is going to translate into far reaching political, economic and social consequences on a scale never seen before. The digital revolution will put more power in the hands of the people without their consciously asking for or realising it. But that power belongs to them and can hardly be taken away.

    Currently, Nigeria’s cell phone lines are a staggering 180 million plus lines. There are 87.7 million internet users which is projected to grow to 187 million by 2023. These millions of people including the rural majority constitute a virtual emerging republic with increasing powers. They may not be a conscious political mass but they are a density of voices. They send and receive money via applications on their cell phones across state and international borders. They exchange messages about their lives and practically everything else up to the limits of their literacy. People can now hold and express views and opinions about practically anything including how they are being governed.

    Sometimes, these views may run counter to those of the powers that be. In a population of nearly 200 million, the sentiments and views expressed by the majority of the 180 million phone enabled citizens ought to constitute the majority view. It clearly swamps the minority consensus of a tiny vocal elite of less than a million privileged people who speak via the conventional media. Of course the freedom of expression on the social media may not be unlimited. The sensitivities of people of power will always be bruised by the things they hate to hear. But even in the most draconian autocracies with governments that have invested heavily in cyber policing, the power in the hands of a digitalized populace remains massive in spite of the censoring compulsions of absolutist regimes and their presiding autocrats.

    Nigeria is still predominantly a pre industrial nation with a surging youthul post- industrial digital populace. But its economy remains mostly heavy laden with most people still sustained by ‘luggage’ orientation goods and services such as cement, sand, brick and mortar, iron and steel, oil refineries, articulated trucks etc. Most people are still engaged in manual labour intensive jobs -farming, construction, physical trading, transportation, basic services etc.

    The Nigerian state has traditionally remained anti intellectual and compulsively averse to innovation. Firmly rooted in the colonial British civil service culture of paper and heaps of useless files driven by the careerism of bureaucrats, our government is essentially a perennial deep state that waits in permanent ambush for incoming military or democratic dispensations.

    This frigid deep state and its overseeing political tenants is bound to be resistant to the imminent virtual republic ruled by millions of subscribers and citizens united by the internet of everything. Because the state is essentially a menial machine of power, holders and wielders of state power will continue to rely on the power of heavy things to hold on to power. Boots on the ground in the form of soldiers and policemen, assault rifles, armored vehicles, tanks at street junctions etc. are likely to remain the major instruments of raw state power. As a consequence, there will be two republics in fluid conflictual transition. Civil society, the private sector and the majority of unclassified citizens have embraced and will multiply and deepen the culture of the digital virtual republic. On the contrary, government as a behemoth of organized cult of power and overbearing regulation may not in itself embrace the new digital technologies as a cultural force at the same pace.

    Yet somehow the security of state power is a great beneficiary of the advances in new technologies. We are at that point where popular sovereignty in the form of digital devices in nearly every hand has become an instrument of political stability. The time has passed when power used to be grabbed by a few ambitious soldiers sending a few illiterate footmen to the telephone exchange to physically disconnect a whole nation from the rest of the world. All it took then was army signals technicians pulling out a few wires from their nodes and sockets while someone rushes to the national radio station to announce yet another successful coup to the nation and the world. The world, especially Africa, is now in a different place.

    In the virtual digital republic, then, the majority of the indices of power as identified by the old philosopher, Bertrand Russel, have migrated into the hands of ordinary people. Power over information and the media. Power over beliefs and ideas. Power over religion. Only the power over raw power, the power of coercion remains firmly in the hands of the state and its presiding political prefects. The rest of the indices have been dispersed into the hands of the common people by the technologies of mass empowerment.

    The governments of the federation, snuggly stuck under the heaps of tattered files and irrelevant bureaucratic procedures, doing the old things the old way are however not content with the threat to state sovereignty and monopoly of power. The anxiety of the political leadership has recently arisen in fits of legislative discomfort and desperation. Legislators in Abuja floated three controversial bills that were fiercely beaten down by public outcry. The first was an attempt to impose stifling regulations on civil society organisations under the guise of regulating the operations of Non Governmental Organisations. The second was an illiterate bill to gag free speech under the guise of seeking to check hate speech among citizens. The third was a bill seeking to limit the bounds of free speech by seeking to control and regulate the social media. All three were informed by blind group interest and ignorance about the dynamics of a changing society.

    This imminent conflict of the ‘two republics’ is bound to further alter the nature and parameters of national sovereignty and the contest for state power. It is already in full play in the conduct and outcomes of our elections. Politicians and their supporting deep state apparatus have fiercely resisted the adoption of free electronic voting. The majority of the people see no reason why not. People cannot understand why balloting cannot be at the touch of a button. No one has explained to us why simple ballot numbers cannot be tallied and why people troop out to vote only for their votes to be voided and subjected to the verdict of a handful of dishonest judges in contentious judicial disputations.

    The clear and urgent challenge of the Nigerian situation is how to integrate the virtual republic of the majority with the behemoth analog republic of crude sovereign power. It is government that needs to move swiftly to connect with the virtual republic of the popular digitalizing masses. This requires greater responsiveness to change and a sweeping reform of governmental processes and orientations. This goes beyond the present selective adoption of digital solutions by some departments of government. The adoption of digital solutions must be wholesome and comprehensive as has been demonstrated in countries like United Arab Emirates, Singapore and even Rwanda.

    Already, in major post- industrial nations, the state has moved quickly to take control of the commanding heights and nodes of the digital age by incorporating the gains of IT into ambit of governance processes. Such integration was however preceded by the acquisition of the relevant know how by government itself. The United States, China, the countries of the European Union and East Asia have all invested heavily in training their personnel especially in the intelligence services, security and armed services as well as industry regulators etc. on the rudiments and ongoing developments in Information Technology. You cannot control what you do not know nor can you effectively regulate what you do not understand.

    For Nigeria, the post Covid-19 moment should be the equivalent of our 1970. This was the moment when the Civil War ended and Nigeria correctly identified its challenge and mission as that of nation building and nation healing. The challenge was clearly that of evolving a new national order to replace the old dysfunctional order. Critical junctures emerge for nations when they can define and name the wrong in their past and chart a new course.

    The post Covid-19 moment ought to be for Nigeria a moment to re-imagine government and recognize the sovereignty of real people and their ordinary needs. As the world prepares to wake from the bad unexpected nightmare of Covid-19, a wave of change is likely to redefine the sovereignty of nations, the power of peoples and the focus of governments. Only in nations where governments meet the people in the new freedom of their virtual reality will greatness have meaning. As the historian Margaret Macmillan recently observed, “The present crisis could be the opportunity for strategies to produce essential public goods and ensure that citizens have safe, decent and fulfilled lives. People coming out of a calamity are open to sweeping changes.”

  • Democracy, Politics and Virus, By Chidi Amuta

    By Chidi Amuta

    Faceless as it is, the Coronavirus may ultimately turn out a rather political virus. It has thrown up new challenges about the management of life (rate of infection) and death (reducing fatalities). Of all emergencies in recent human history, perhaps this virus has engaged the attention of politicians and world leaders more than anything else.

    Its summons is instant and ever urgent. It has even re-written a few national budgets and re-arranged the stock markets of the world at a rate and in ways never before anticipated. On the average, the developed economies of the West are committing anywhere between 8-25% of GDP in emergency intervention to protect their populace from the worst economic hazards of the corona pandemic. Neither the onset of national elections nor even a full fledged war has electrified political leaders into such desperate frenzy as this virus. Hopefully, when it is all over, the coronavirus will have fundamentally redefined politics as the management of resources to meet the expectations of the greatest majority.

    The virus may not have discriminated along racial, ethnic, ideological or even national boundaries, yet it is keeping politicians busy justifying their mandates and scoring instant results for their constituencies. Whether we like it or not, the Coronavirus is making a difference among the leaderships of the world. Gradually, it is beginning to emerge as a barometer of efficiency among leaders of nations.

    Quite unexpectedly, democracy as the dominant political idiom of our age has come under a testy stress in different places in terms of how different systems have dealt with the corona virus. The critical question in this regard is: can democracy justify its preponderance when leaders are challenged to protect their peoples from an unseen and unexpected situation?

    The virus took off in authoritarian China. It devastated a province with an estimated population of 60 million inhabitants, leaving an official casualty figure of 3,312 which is still open to controversy. Yet, that authoritarian state was able to summon its traditional dictatorial ethos to push back the virus with astounding results. It put up four mega hospitals in a few days, tested and treated a record number of cases while locking down and quarantining an area nearly the size of Nigeria. In a matter of weeks, the virus receded, literally chased away by the iron will of a people energised by a determined leadership.

    Today, China is healing rapidly and is on the path to reasonable recovery from the virus. China’s rate of recovery from the virus, though still incomplete, remains almost miraculous in a world where the ravages of the pandemic are still unfolding with mounting fatalities. China has returned from 95% business closures to nearly that percentage of resumption. The people of Wuhan, the most affected area, have been summoned out of quarantine and back to life and work. China has learnt the lessons of lockdowns, emergency healthcare research and delivery and returned to work as the largest single producer and exporter of medical goods against the virus. A fortnight ago, Spain ordered $500 million worth of medical resources from China. From all over the world, orders for medical supplies estimated at over $25 billion are being processed and supplied.

    No one has heard from North Korea. But the hermit kingdom would seem to have contained the spread of the coronavirus into its iron clad enclave or at least may have managed to contain information about the activities of the virus within its borders. Even the most exaggerated western speculations on the virus in North Korea put the fatality rate at less than 100 mostly among frontier soldiers and service personnel.

    Russia, itself an illiberal democracy, has not fared badly either. Despite sharing a common long border with China, Russia has recorded a total of 3,548 cases and only 30 deaths. Its lockdown and social distancing and isolation regime remains one of the most aggressive and draconian in the world.

    Meanwhile, the hallmarks of liberal democracy, the United States and Western Europe, have been devastated by Coronavirus. Italy has recorded 13,155 deaths; Spain has lost 9,387, USA has lost 5,112, France has 4,032; Great Britain 2,352 and Germany has lost 931 lives. As of the time of this writing, a plane load of medical equipment and supplies was on its way from Russia to the United States to support the government. The usually boisterous and ebullient Donald Trump has become a bit sobre and somber these days, humbled by an ordinary invisible virus!

    But it is not a simple division between democracies and non democracies. It is not even a simple East-West line of demarcation. The younger Asian democracies have fared better than others in managing the virus and its outcomes. South Korea with a population of 51.5 million has had only 144 deaths; Taiwan with a population of 24 million has had only 4 deaths. Singapore, a city- state with a paternalistic political system and a population of 8 million has had only 2 deaths.

    One explanation of the relative success of the East Asian young democracies over the older western democracies in managing the coronavirus emergency is the speed and relative efficiency of their bureaucracies. The less cumbersome a bureaucracy, the more speedy they tend to be in their responsiveness to the needs of the people.

    However, it would seem that the real distinction among nations in terms of the results they have scored in managing the pandemic may be that between liberal democracies and the illiberal democracies. The distinction is between democracies that observe the full gamut of freedoms and liberties on the one hand and the ones who observe the ritual of elections but constrain the classical freedoms of democracy.

    The illiberal democracies tend to reduce their primary obligation to the people to security defined in terms of physical security and security from disease, hunger, deprivation. They place basic freedoms beneath security so defined. In this regard, the illiberal democracies are better able to enforce social distancing, lockdowns and quarantines than the liberal citadels.

    So far, not much attention has been paid to the relative low infection and fatality rates in sub Saharan African countries. Our numbers may be dodgy and unscientific. Our testing regimes may be unreliable and clinically deficient. We may not know exactly the rate of infection in Africa yet. But one thing you cannot hide from Africans is mass death and any disease that afflicts people in droves. In rural and crowded poor urban Africa, the coronavirus is yet to make devastating land fall. In a slom, social distancing is alien and foolish. May be it is the heat in our climate. Maybe it is something about the myth of the virus being afraid of hardy black genes except those of black people living like white people in air conditioned large houses. No one knows exactly. But so far, Nigeria with an estimated population of 200 million has less than 200 reported cases and a fatality of less than 3.

    For us in Nigeria,however, the coronavirus has more important political meanings and messages. It has thrown up the question of leadership. It is in a time of national emergency that politicians are challenged to display the essential leadership for which they step forward to be elected. The jury is still out on the quality of leadership that the Nigerian federal government has so far provided since the coronavirus surfaced. In spite of the palpable early threats and increasing fatalities in China, Europe and the United states, the Nigerian government was slow in ordering a closure of the nation’s borders to flights and movements of persons from Europe, the United States and parts of Asia. Even when that decision was made, its implementation was haphazard and disorderly.

    The psychological aspect of leadership in a national crisis did not seem to interest Abuja. President Buhari was quite reluctant to address the nation on the desperate public health emergency that was already ravaging the world. A cross section of the populace was unanimous in calling on the president to address the nation, to minimally show concern and empathy in the face of an unusual public health emergency. Nigerians needed a reassurance that something was being done to protect them from a clear and present life and death danger. It took that level of orchestration and over three weeks for the president to finally make a recorded broadcast.

    Yet such reluctant leadership fell far short of global standards in such an emergency. Over and above a ceremonial national anthem broadcast event, leaders all over the world have mostly entered the trenches to reassure their peoples on a daily basis with facts and figures on what is being done to protect their lives and alleviate the economic hardships attendant on the pandemic. As we speak, Nigerians are still at a loss as to where and how to obtain basic testing for the virus and how to access medical care in the event of an infection. Ignorant state governors are ordering lockdowns without simole first aid kits in their public hospitals!

    Nonetheless, the coronavirus has a political dividend for Nigerians in general and Mr. Buhari’s lack luster presidency in particular. Prior to the coronavirus, Mr. Buhari had settled into the unenviable legacy of being the most disastrous elected leader in Nigerian history. He seemed content with leading a divisive administration in which Nigerians were divided along all conceivable lines. A worrisome North-South divide had emerged and was being furiously orchestrated by both Buhari devotees and their equally strident southern antagonists. A clamour for re-structuring of the country into a truly functional federation has gained currency. Even more sinister, a Christian-Moslem divide had been further weaponized by the unrelenting assaults of Boko Haram and the opportunistic criminality of fundamentalists and political zealots.

    The onset of the coronavirus has reunified the nation against a common unseen enemy. In a National Assembly that is largely averse to issues- driven debate, the virus has forged a bipartisanship hitherto unseen on any national issue. The legislature has been frightened into a solidarity with the executive on any measure that would protect the nation against this virus. There is no certainty that this solidarity will survive the end of the virus threat. The unseen enemy may vanish with these intangible political benefits.

    It is not just at the national federal level that the coronavirus has made a leadership proposition in Nigeria. At the sub-sovereign level of state administration, one state government out of the 36 and the Federal Capital Territory has emerged as an example of outstanding leadership in a time of crisis. Building upon the pioneer role of Lagos in the fight against the Ebola virus in 2013-2014, the current administration of Lagos state has stepped up to the plate. It has provided timely information on the virus, set up identifiable testing centers and isolation facilities. It has created isolation wards in designated public hospitals with real time updated information on infections, admissions, discharges and contact tracing efforts while admitting its limitations. At a time when the nation’s borders are closed and airports are shut, Lagos has emerged as a decisive destination in the nation’s fight against the coronavirus by sheer dint of the quality of its political leadership.

    Nigeria has joined the ranks of locked down republics. But the long term political and economic implications of the coronavirus emergency are brewing underneath the present silence of fear. Oil prices will rebound as the world economy recovers thereby assuaging the more dire economic predictions. But like most things in the Nigerian public place, the legacy of the coronavirus is likely to be political. The scramble for power in 2023 may just have found a single most memorable campaign subject.

  • A Virus With Dividends – Chidi Amuta

    Chidi Amuta

    In his play, Madmen and Specialists, Wole Soyinka acknowledges evil as a potent force of history. At the climactic moment, the deranged professor protagonist admits the role of his own evil essence with a caveat: ‘Poison has its uses. You can either use it to kill or to cure’. This could be a fitting summation of the ironic mission of the raging Covid-19 virus pandemic. As nations, powerful and weak alike, cower under the grip of this most lethal pathogen; the invisible adversary may bear dividends which our current morbid frenzy may not readily perceive.

    Understandably, these are dreadful times. In the worst affected countries, the bereaved can no longer attend funerals because they do not know if it is going to be theirs next. Recreational ice rinks have been turned into morgues as mortuaries are themselves bursting with morbid occupancy. The rituals of social existence have come to a screeching halt as whole nations have been quarantined behind the closed doors of wherever people call home. Suddenly, the things we were accustomed to taking for granted have suddenly become forbidden rituals of death or invitations to ailments with no certain cure. The citadels of high knowledge grope pitifully for a cure that humanity never anticipated. The places of comfort have suddenly turned into abodes of ominous danger, disease and even death as no one knows where this dark enemy lurks. As the powerful and the weak alike scurry behind closed doors, the very fabric of society and its communal essence have been fatally altered and fractured.

    Corona virus struck at a time when humanity had become more united by technology than ever before. A world united by a ubiquitous social media and anonymous mob psychology is a ready victim to an unseen enemy that kills in thousands. The global crowd of common work and common leisure is suddenly dispersed by the silent voice of imminent death. An ancient unifier, the fear of death, has forced us all indoors to rediscover the primacy of self, family, the essential individuality of our mortality and the privacy of our primal destinies.

    Yet, beneath the morbid siege of the unseen enemy, there may in fact be hidden dividends, benefits and lessons. Globally, the rise of Donald Trump and like-minded populist autocrats in different countries had made isolationism and rugged nationalism a growing fashion. Nations were shrinking inwards, retreating behind their borders, shutting out immigrants, refugees and sometimes-honest visitors. The gains of globalisation and a borderless world forged by trade, commerce and technology were being furiously eroded as new noisy slogans of selfish nationalism (‘America First!) and isolationism rent the air. The threats to our common humanity were palpable as the bonds that held nations in multilateral arrangements were being routinely shredded and dissolved. Global problems like climate change, inequality, extreme poverty, terrorism, the threat of nuclear conflict and the likelihood of epidemics were being deliberately downplayed.

    Between the United States and its global power rivals, mainly Russia and China, a new but silent arms race and lavish build up was taking shape as a new struggle for global pre –eminence gathered steam. By the third quarter of 2019, Mr Trump could boast that he had committed a frightening $2 trillion to re- arming and re-equipping the United States for global pre eminence as mankind’s most formidable war machine. China and Russia unabashedly showed off new military equipment with previously unimagined capacities for mass murder.

    Suddenly, the Corona virus pandemic strikes literally from nowhere. National boundaries have become useless in the wake of a virus that respects no borders. Arms and armaments are hardly called for because the world is at war with an enemy that has no face, no formations, no command and control, no rank and file and no recognisable uniform. As the virus spreads death and disease across national borders, attacking the powerful and lowly alike, national borders have become mere demarcations on the face of the earth, useful for the statistics of infection, disease spread and likely death. All the immigration controls, border walls, protective migration control legislations, trade barriers and other newfound separatist gimmicks have come under severe stress.

    By a curious reversal, a virus that respects no borders is forcing the world to revert to the power of international cooperation to deal with an affliction that is blind to artificial demarcations. The corona virus recognises no passports, no skin colour, no social status. It is even blind to fame and bank account balance. Leaders that hitherto shunned international cooperation are turning to the rest of the world in search of protection for their citizens. In one day alone, Mr Trump confessed that he had been in touch with over 150 nations on ways to fight the Corona virus in a concerted manner. Two days ago, the arch immigration and travel ban president was lifting the ban of professionals from the ‘shit hole countries’ of Africa in search of doctors and nurses. The powerful Group of 20 (G20) most developed economies had to meet by telephone conference as their leaders are hunkered at home, forbidden from physical contact or even proximity with each other!

    Suddenly, race, nationality, social class, geography and all the other divisive parameters that politicians usually conjure up to protect their interests and advance narrow national interests have become redundant. Interestingly, Covid-19, by the pattern of its infections in major countries, has attacked the blight of inequality with perhaps a direct message to those whose job it is to reduce inequality. By a curious irony of faith, political leaders, celebrities and global business moguls have fallen primary victims of the new virus.

    Above and beyond the urgent compulsion to international cooperation and the restoration of the post World War II global order, the power of the nation state is being challenged anew. The primary duty of protection of the citizens has come back to centre stage as the Leviathan is summoned to urgent duty. Big government is being challenged to return to the primary work of the social contract. What now cuts across all nations is the protection of its citizens from the present public health emergency and its economic consequences. This is a call that nations are answering according to their divergent abilities.

    The United States Congress has approved an unprecedented $2 trillion splash to salvage families, businesses and institutions from the economic dislocations attendant on the Corona virus assault. The United Kingdom has voted an equally whopping £500 billion as have France, Germany and the other EU countries. Here in Nigeria, he federal government has made some incoherent noises that indicate basic concern even if belatedly.

    All over the world, the onset of the pandemic has redefined the parameters of society as we know it. First, it has compelled the emergence of a new language for communicating our common predicament as humans. In one of the most injurious linguistic assaults on the concept of society, we now have something called ‘social distancing’, a veritable damage to the communal essence and soul of society as a close bond that unites humanity. We are a society because we can reach out and touch our family, friends and neighbours. The ritual places that underline our humanity and sociality such as churches, mosques, stadia and night -clubs are shut because they cannot obey the new aberration of ‘social distancing’. There are other new linguistic deformations. To reduce the incidence of the virus, governments must now work to ‘flatten the curve’ of both new cases and rate of casualty. In order to reduce the spread of the virus, we must now ‘self quarantine’ or go into ‘voluntary isolation’, sometimes even from our families!

    In the process, the essential sociality of our humanity has become devastated. The compulsive handshake of friendship, fellowship and partnership, the endearing hug of family, the spontaneous welcome of the kids to a long gone parent, the universal hunger for love and the magnetic pull of amorous allure; all these have suddenly gone cold as we maintain a mandatory distance of a meter and half from each other.

    In order to keep our livelihood on life support by working, organisations and employers now mandate workers to work from home. This license of necessity is good in itself. Even when the virus abates and disappears, humanity will have dissevered that it is possible to achieve so much work through stretching the elasticity of the digital canvass. Digital technology will attain greater penetration to serve us better.

    Not to talk of the license of leisure and luxury at every level. Whether it is the palm wine joint or the high brow drinking lounge, there is a temporary halt to group night time revelry. For the elite, the copious array of international cuisine at choice restaurants in cities of the world will have to wait. Even, the freedom which globalization and travel at the speed of light offered to those who could afford to jet off at the slightest inkling is in abeyance for now.

    Nearer home in Nigeria, the Corona virus has exposed the naked underbelly of the totem we erected and worship as government. Only in Lagos state has sovereignty displayed the committed responsibility that justifies its mandate. In the other states it is a mixed bag of the ridiculous and the half hearted. Some state governors have decreed their states immune from the virus as an act of divide covenant!

    At the federal level, it has been a series of knee jerk actions that at best indicate embarrassing confusion at the apex of power. Borders and entry points were left open for a little too long. There has been little or no synergy among government agencies on a coordinated approach to protect our populace from the virus. The belief seems to be that the staccato of uncoordinated actions will shield Nigerians from the worst hazards of the pandemic and eventually vindicate governmental lack of seriousness. The federal government has convened a committee of laymen to handle the pandemic in a nation replete with all manner of world class medical and scientific experts.

    And for the economic consequences, we can only await apocalypse in instalments. Businesses, markets and offices are shutting down. Livelihoods are also shutting down. As in the rest of the world, jobs will be lost. Lives and livelihoods will evaporate and the poverty spread will widen.

    Our natural national recourse to religion for succour will not serve us now. Religion thrives on congregations. Social distancing abhors crowds. One good part is that the organised crime of evangelical extortion in the churches will slow down a bit. The tribe of ‘cash and carry’ pastors whose cash flow projections were tied to the wallets of impoverished congregants may have to rethink their business plans as the congregants stay home.

    On the good side, the Corona virus emergency has forced a new solidarity and commonality of fear among Nigerians. The artificial walls that divide us have taken a back seat. The Corona virus has forced the National Assembly into a bipartisan consensus of the frightened. Corona virus does not discriminate between Moslems and Christians, Southerners and Northerners, Buhari devotees and PDP stalwarts. A new boundary has gone up: it is that between those who have the virus and those who do not.

    Pretty soon, the corona virus emergency will go away and may leave us all in an altered state. Hopefully, there will be a restoration of international solidarity against humanity’s common adversaries and challenges. In our nation, we now know the limits and limitations of our governments. In our private lives, perhaps we will witness stronger family communion and maybe a better appreciation of our mortality. For me, the few biblical quotes I still recall now point to the end of this travail: ‘This, too, shall pass’. Soon, we will be able to recall it all and say: ‘And it came to pass’!

     

    Chidi Amuta is a member of TNG’s advisory board

  • A Fierce Urgency in the North – Chidi Amuta

    Chidi Amuta

    Our north is suddenly in bold relief. Intelligence estimates among most influential agencies in the world are unanimous on one thing: the northern half of Nigeria has emerged as an area of grave strategic instability. The region is fast degenerating into an internal security nightmare and an imminent danger to regional security. It poses a danger to itself, to the Nigerian state and indeed the whole of West Africa and the larger Gulf of Guinea stretch.

    A combination of widespread violent criminality, sectarian insurgency, economic desperation and social dislocations has created a vast terrain of trouble. This should concern every Nigerian. While the immediate manifestations are located in the north, the wider implications are national in scope and import. We may not all live in the north. But the trends that are now haunting the region constitute an existential threat to Nigeria’s long-term stability and continuation as a united democratic state.

    Political correctness may dictate that we desist from discussing Nigeria’s problems along a North –South axis. But it is such persistent self -delusion and self-denial that have brought us face to face with the frightening urgency of the present moment.

    The specter of a meltdown in the north has happily of late aroused some voices of concern and enlightenment in the region itself. A few significant leaders have correctly identified the seeds of the present danger. The Emir of Kano, Lamido Sanusi, has been persistent in this regard. Similarly, current Kaduna state Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, has not only identified the causes but taken executive steps to address some of them head on.

    The specific manifestatons include abject poverty, educational backwardness, destitution, unemployment, nutrition deficiency and the demographic time bomb of uncontrolled population growth. An estimated 90% of Nigeria’s 87 million abjectly poor people live in the north. Its population of out of school kids (over 8 million) is far higher than the national average. The incidence of general nutritional deficiency in the region is uncomfortably high. Education standards remain dismal as an affirmative action called quota system that has been in place for over 50 years has not managed to raise standards but only turned out a quantum of high school and university graduates that are generally uncompetitive.

    A demographic time bomb ticks away uncontrolled as family sizes have increased geometrically in the absence of sensible social policy and taming of cultural profligacy. Droves of excess children roam the streets as vagrants, beggars or plain destitutes. Access to cheap opioids and counterfeit narcotics has produced hordes of mindlessly violent criminals or dazed youth with no moral or economic anchors. Enter the bandits, cattle rustlers, kidnappers and random killers now roaming the region. Add to this the relative free flow of arms throughout the Sahel from ungoverned stretches from Sudan, Libya, Mali and through the weak borders between Nigeria and Chad, Niger and parts of Cameroun.

    The violence and insecurity that is raging through the north resembles every bad place in today’s world. The unknown gangs that strike at night, torching villages and whole settlements only to disappear in the day bear the footprints of the Janjaweed militia that laid the foundations for the dismemberment of Sudan. The squads of suicide bombers that strike atmarkets, churches and public buildings bear the imprints of the Al Shabab terror gangs in Somalia and parts of Kenya.

    The Boko Haram factions that raid towns, cart away school girls in lorry loads and take territory while imposing their reign of terror on whole local governments sound like a script from the worst of ISIS and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Shiite factions that are ready to carry their grudges to engage security forces in gun duels in the center of Abuja sound like an attempt to convert a bit of Abuja into something like war time Kabul. The various militias and bandit squads threatening the various states and extorting their governors bear the semblance of the casual militias that seized control of parts of Libya after the demise of Muamar Gaddafi. But the unfolding tragedy in northern Nigeria is entirely home made even if it mimics bad behavior elsewhere.

    We cannot afford to localize the implications of the situation in the north to the region. They are national problems that should challenge every Nigerian because the troubles in the north are a clear and present threat to the security of Nigeria. Our country has always been one continuum of geography, culture, free movements and exchanges. The roving Fulani herdsmen of yore have become the weaponized killers and kidnappers of today. The millions of Almajirin children that have virtually no parental ties have invaded the streets of Lagos and other southern towns as beggars and miscreants. The burden of a seemingly intractable insurgency engagement with Boko Haram and its affiliates has thrust us into a war that no one planned for. Our defence and security budgets have jumped over the last decade and still increasing.

    There is no room for equivocation. The trouble with the sad situation in the north is squarely that of regional political leadership. We must confront it for what it is. In the 50 years since the end of the Nigerian civil war, both apex federal political leadership and the leadership of all the northern states have collectively and variously failed the people. An affirmative action programme otherwise called quota system has been in force in education and employment in federal establishments for that long. Taken together, these massive appropriations of privilege have only yielded the crisis currently on hand.

    But we are in a national emergency and there is no time for the luxury of shifting blames. So much time has passed. So much resource has been wasted. So many opportunities have been squandered and there is no sweetness anywhere in the region. This is of course not to say that other parts of the country are paradise. But no other region of Nigeria faces the lethal existential threats that loom over the north today.

    Yet, we must return to the leadership question in confronting the northern question. We must quit treating the north as a monolithic political spectrum with a leadership that has a uniform agenda, uniform perspective and undifferentiated orientation. It is time to differentiate among the competing political elites in the north and their various tendencies to determine what can move the region forward.

    From the evidence of those who have so far served in public life at the state or federal levels, we can discriminate among northern leaders in terms of their ideological tendencies.
    The Buhari administration is an inchoate throwback to an ultra-conservative north. This is the north of the fabled Kaduna mafia syndrome. This is the north of Adamu Ciroma, Mamman Daura, Ango Abdullahi, Abba Kyari, Ismaila Funtua and their predecessors. Its perspective of Nigeria is essentially a hegemonic feudal one, informed by a jihadist conquest mentality. Even under severe constitutional constraints, this formation sees the nation as something of a Medieval fiefdom, an occupied territory, not a national patrimony. It insists on dominating the strategic heights of national power to an extent that frightens other parts of the country and tacitly divides the country along a north-south line, which also unfortunately conforms to a religious divide. Fear of this decadent conservatism has united the rest of the country in opposition against the government of the day. In this formation lies the crux of Mr. Buhari’s lingering headache.

    There is a nationalist liberal democratic formation of leadership from the north. This is roughly the formation that produced the late Murtala Mohammed and is best illustrated by Ibrahim Babangida, Aliyu Gusau, Atiku Abubakar, Abubakar Dangiwa Umar, and Buba Marwa etc. These leaders believe in a united, diverse and all-inclusive Nigeria, a Nigeria that works well for all its citizens to thrive. They reach out across the vast stretch of the nation to cultivate a national sense of unity based on respect for the rights of every group to the Nigerian patrimony. This brand of leadership of northern extraction does not frighten other groups but is instead inclusive, liberal and enlightened.

    In recent times, there has emerged a social democratic arm of this liberal leadership. These are people like Emir Sanusi, Nasir El Rufai, a bit of Shehu Sani and their many modern minded young followers. This younger generation of leaders are not content with the entitlement state of the past. They insist on accountability, enlightenment, modernization and a rejection of the old order. Their development models seem to be rooted in the Islamic enlightenment exemplified by the rising Gulf States of the Middle East. They are calling out the profligate governors of the northern states, the traditional rulers and fellow political office holders. They are raising inconvenient questions about the state of the north. In this process, they command a wide admiration of the younger generation of Nigerians across all divides.

    Whether or not we admit it, the political leadership of the north will become the key national security question of the next decade. Looming confrontations between the conservative order and the new social democrats uprising will define the politics of the region. If the old conservative order succeeds Buhari, the current insecurity and hopelessness in the north is likely to endure.

    If, however, the new social democratic forces manage to prevail, the north will be at the beginning of a springtime of a long and painful modernization. But this ascension will be fiercely resisted and mercilessly resisted by custodians of the old order and the multitudes of illiterate and unenlightened mobs that their reign of insensitivity has created.

    But the spillover of that looming confrontation will have implications for the rest of the country. The quality of governance and leadership that emerges in the entire geo strategic space of the north is going to determine whether Nigeria remains stable or even survives as one nation under democratic governance. The nascent forces of social democracy and modernization in the north can only hope to succeed if they engage with like-minded elements in the rest of the country to inaugurate a national rule by change agents.

    As things stand, getting the north right has become an urgent national imperative. It also means getting the rest of Nigeria right. If we fail to rescue the north, an imploding north will either drag the country down or the rest of the country will jettison the north as an unbearable financial, social and security burden. The prospects are too frightening and ugly to contemplate.

    *Dr. Chidi Amuta is a Member of Thisday Editorial Board

  • The shadow of illiberal democracy – Chidi Amuta

    As Nigerian politicians jostle for winning pedestals, an outlandish reality has sneaked into town. The country is sliding from an opportunity to build liberal democracy towards an Illiberal democracy and, I am afraid, even an outright populist autocracy.

    The signs are now abundant: the personalization of security institutions, an assault on the legislative branch, a division of the nation into regime devotees and dissenting partisans, a preference for the military over the police in matters of security , law and order, serial blackmailing of honest judges and constriction of media freedom and avenues for civil disobedience. There is above all the increasing use of intimidation strategies to frighten regime opponents.

    The recent invasion of the Nigerian Parliament by state sponsored masked gunmen was only the more open and brazen prelude to the onset of illiberal democracy. Whether or not he ordered that disgraceful assault , the incident may go down as Mr. Buhari’s poster political imprint. His subsequent political career will either be an affirmation of his familiar Illiberal identity or its repudiation in favour of an open democratic agenda.

    The scene was somewhat reminiscent of the 5th October, 1993 invasion of the Russian parliament by military tanks in support of Boris Yeltsin who was intent on protecting his narrow electoral victory against pro-Gorbachev legislators. With that incident, Russia entered a long night of Illiberal democracy that has endured till the present Putin virtual autocracy.

    Illiberal democracy defines a systematic assault on the foundations of freedom which make liberal democracy strong. The assault on individual rights , the rule of law and freedom of expression are only followed by invasion of representative structures. Intimidation through the systematic abuse of security institutions completes the picture.

    What makes Illiberal democracy more dangerous is that it is often the handiwork of an otherwise freely elected header. A fledgling autocrat hides under the banner of democracy and popular mandate to advance an anti democratic one man agenda.

    The use of the strategies of illiberal democracy to foist an autocracy can resonate in developing societies if the aspiring autocrat is armed with a vision and a thoughtful direction for his nation. To deploy the tools of autocracy in the absence of a vision is the highway to mindless absolutism. Nigerians under the current Buharir rule should , in popular parlance, ‘shine their eyes’.

    There are fundamental cautions and road signs for present day Nigeria.First, It is not just enough to invoke vacuous notions of nationalism or to dredge up a peasant nostalgia of a glorious past that wasn’t there to begin with. Second, it does not make much political sense to erect a moral divide between ‘saints’ and ‘sinners’ on matters of public corruption while frightening honest judges and blackmailing tactful journalists. Third, an open liberal democratic culture requires greater rigor and respect for the independence of the institutions of freedom. Fourth, a pretension to democracy that ascribes to an elected leader the status of an infallible pontifax Maximus can only lead to autocracy, fake moral absolutism and ultimately an Illiberal democracy.

    In many parts of the world, democracy and its liberal foundation is under serious threat from leaders with divergent absolutely agenda. Xi in China, Trump in America, Erdogan in Turkey, Maduro in Venezuela, Putin in Russia, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and the butcher, Duterte, in the Philippines all represent the different faces of a new breed of ‘strong men’ . They all signal the threatened state of democracy. They all have come to power under the guise of one form of democracy or the other but are all intent on subverting the liberal foundation of democracy.

    These leaders are different faces of one man rule flying the flag of a new nationalism. They insist that the people desperately want economic power over and above the fine values of liberal democracy- free speech, political correctness and old institutions run by worn bureaucrats.

    Uniformly, the strategy of rising one man autocracies is to find an enemy to blame the nation’s ills on in order to cloak and market their rise to the popular masses. Putin blames pro West elites; Viktor Orban blames George Soros and Nicholas Maduro blames the US and his neighbours.

    In Nigeria, Mr. Buhari blames his political opponents especially the PDP whose splinter brought him to power for nearly everything from rampant corruption to Herdsmen killings and his incoherent economic policies… He carefully and craftily directs this message at his more illiterate mass audiences while alienating the elite who are likely to ask questions about his basic competence.

    .Every fledging autocrat still clings to the title of democracy as an instrument for winning the next election and hanging a banner of popular mandate on what is clearly an anti democratic scheme.

    In the older democracies like the US, a certain resilience of institutions can be trusted to protect and preserve the democratic order. Even then, populist autocrats try and test the resilience of old institutions as we are seeing with Donald Trump in the United States.

    The plight of young newish and fragile democracies under strong man autocracy is more worrisome. The institutions tend to be fragile, tenuous and often compromised . Those who head them see their allegiance to the strongman as higher than their sworn obligation to the constitution and the nation.

    It is a typical African political disease. This is the rule of the president as ‘African Chief’ to whom all institutions and privileges of state are extensions of a semi feudal domain. In Nigeria, the tradition of the president as ‘Oga’, a respected elder has been institutionalized. With the succession of ageing civil war generals as elected presidents, we are in an ‘Ogacracy’..

    Mr. Buhari’s flirtation with Illiberal stunts is not entirely his making. Because of his draconian military antecedents, he and his devotees may have come to cast him as the quintessential strong man who can bend institutions to discipline an errant society.

    Far from it. His leadership of the executive branch in the last three years indicates differently. We may in fact be dealing with a rather weak leader. Urgent decisions are delayed. The most strategic institutions are manned by incompetent people with private agenda. An entire national security structure is uncoordinated while the machinery of government presents as rustic and rudderless. Key presidential functions appear outsourced to ambitious deputies and clannish warlords. An entire nation is now engulfed by a huge question: Who is in charge here?

    A weak and incompetent leader straining to foist a populist autocracy is a recipe for tragedy. To do so on the eve of a general election is to bring Armageddon even closer and mortally endanger the possibility of democratic becoming. A diverse and fractious polity such as ours is best left as a very liberal, pluralistic and even noisy democracy. The challenge of leadership in a place like this is to navigate the political complexity of diversity by making political deals when necessary; To seek to ‘conquer’ partisan opponents.is wrong headed.To insist on a forceful autocratic path is a highway to Yugoslavia. Nigerians, I am sure, don’t want to go there.

    • Dr. Chidi Amuta, a member of Thisdsy Editorial Board, is Chairman of Wilson & Weizmann Associates Ltd.., Lagos.

  • General Theophilus Hobbes – Chidi Amuta

    By Chidi Amuta

    On the scale of anti-heroes produced by Nigeria’s history of violent disruptions, Mr. Theophilus Danjuma, stands out in glowing notoriety. Endlessly rewarded by all regimes since after his 1966 bloody emergence as military supremo and poster coupist, he has also emerged as easily one of Nigeria’s wealthiest men, mostly for reasons other than his industry, corporate ingenuity or even plain hard work. On account of his long-standing presence in power circles, Danjuma has managed to anticipate some audience whenever Nigerians are pressed by bad governance to desperately seek an alarmist town crier. We are clearly at one such moment once again.

    Therefore, Danjuma’s latest outburst on the sad security situation in the nation falls into a familiar pattern. For a veteran coup maker, the exploitation of public disaffection to align with the general drift of public opinion is a familiar gimmick. But this time, while Danjuma’s outburst on the epidemic of killer gangs virtually all over the country may be in tune with our collective pain and anger, it ricochets with loud echoes of Thomas Hobbes’s picture of anarchy when the state is absent.

    Nigerians are united in their concern about the rampaging impunity and uncontrolled audacity of murderous Killer gangs and herdsmen all over the country. We are all worried that a band of armed bandits under the guise of either cattle herding or sectarian zealotry have been allowed to terrorize the entire nation and in the process make nonsense of an overstretched and disorganized security apparatus. Those with any sense of history cannot but sleep with one eye open as tragic insecurity engulfs the northern half of the country with unfamiliar trends: cattle rustling, kidnapping for ransom, Janjaweed like scorched earth attacks that raze whole towns and villages with industrial scale casualty figures.

    Ordinarily, President Buhari is not my kettle of tea. Characteristically, the President has displayed a less than keen interest in ending the menace of these killer gangs while in the process allowing all manner of tales to spiral around the crisis. Similarly, both the military and the police have repeatedly proved impotent on the matter of containing killer herdsmen and other casual killer squads, again tempting all manner of unsavoury conclusions. This situation has not been made any better by the uneducated utterances of high government officials like Buhari’s Defence and Information Ministers and even the chief of police, respectively.

    There is of course no justification for the apparent tacit support, which all manner of killer gangs seem to be enjoying under President Buhari. This conclusion is above the politics of the moment. No definition of partisanship can outsource these killings to an opposition party. The failure to take absolute responsibility for the security of the lives of every Nigerian can only be ascribed to one factor: crass incompetence and lack of executive decisiveness. No previous administration has presided over such a massive decimation of Nigerians in peacetime.

    While these concessions remain valid, Mr. Danjuma’s choice of venue to cry out about the Taraba chapter of the new national killing sport – a university in his home state- does not quite fit into his erstwhile branding as a national elder statesman. The industrial scale sporadic killings of innocent citizens that has become the identity badge of the Buhari presidency is not localized to Taraba or Danjuma’s Jukun ethnicity. Nor are they geopolitically skewed in any way. Anambra, Abia, Delta, Ekiti, Benue, Nasarawa , Plateau, Kaduna, Zamfara, Kano states have all been theatres in an ever expanding national killing field featuring killer herdsmen and other migrants and vagrants .

    If indeed Mr. Danjuma is concerned about the abuse of the military and its use to aid and abet violations of people’s rights, why is he just waking up now? If Mr. Danjuma wanted to atone for his murky past and acquire a national voice, where was he when the same military over which he had previously presided repeatedly (according to Amnesty International and most local observer groups) committed the mass killings of unarmed IPOB and MASSOB sympathizers in Onitsha and other parts of the South East?

    Maybe it is also part of the attributes of men of immense power and wealth to develop amnesia even on matters that they themselves presided over. Maybe I was the Defence Minister under whose watch the little town of Odi in Bayelsa state was reduced to rubble. I was probably the Minister of Defence when Zaki Biam in Benue State was similarly flattened by tanks and armoured vehicles.

    Danjuma is a privileged citizen who has full unfettered access to the president. I have lost count of how many presidential advisory committees he is chairing under the Buhari presidency. There is no indication that Mr. Danjuma has tried and failed to get a presidential audience to air his views to Mr. Buhari on these and other matters. I guess it is easier and more convenient to seek audience to canvass yet another oil bloc than to proffer suggestions on how to improve the state of our national security. Since Danjuma was playing to the gallery, he could have gone the whole hog by openly canvassing suggestions on which the public can engage the government in search of ways to improve a bad situation.

    While the idealism and fire of youth can tempt those angry with government to scream at high pitch, the wisdom of age dictates that elders do not rouse the rabble or pull down the homestead. Danjuma’s statement may fit into his definition of freedom of speech. But it steps overboard into the realm of irresponsible utterance and even treasonable incitement.

    The full implication of Danjuma’s call for self help in matters of self-defense by citizens goes beyond his immediate constituency. It is a toxic epistle on political philosophy of a most decadent variety. This dangerous epistle is addressed to all Nigerians who today feel increasingly exposed and vulnerable to these marauding killer gangs. It is simply a call to arms against fellow Nigerians and a tacit defiance of the state and its security apparatus. It announces and inaugurates the onset of a state of nature, a land of everyman to himself and God for all of us.

    If we were to revert to a state of nature, the armed masses in defiance of the state would be out in the streets machetes, Dane guns, bows and arrows, clubs, cudgels and all. Even a dysfunctional state with the weakest semblance of law and order and a monopoly of the instruments of violence is still our best guarantee for the protection and defense of our residual freedoms, holdings and rights. Our challenge is to make the state work through the periodic regime changes that democracy guarantees.

    But in the nightmare universe of Danjuma’s toxic advocacy, the strong will kill the weak except the weak come together in mutinous gangs and arm themselves for self-defense since the state, according to him, has failed. For Danjuma, the state is failing, Nigerians should go back to a state of nature akin to what Thomas Hobbes described, a place where anarchy reigns and life is short, nasty and brutish. It was the fear of this descent into anarchy that prompted Thomas Hobbes to argue for the necessity of order under a sovereign leviathan. Danjuma who owes his emergence, prominence, fame and fortune to anarchic decapitation of a sovereign wants a nation of anarchists.