THE NATION ON SUNDAY OCTOBER 9, 2011
Column
A summit of extremists
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XTREMISTS cannot have a summit. A summit is a gathering of rational and clear-headed people. A summit is a talking shop, all right, but it is a talking shop of sane people. This is part of the multiple contradictions rocking contemporary Nigeria. Those who believe that a Sovereign National Conference is the cure-all panacea for our current woes have their work cut out for them. In a whirlpool of irrationality, how do you determine when sovereignty has finally slipped from a postcolonial state fundamentally rigged against rationality? But extremists can actually have a summit, that is as a culmination of irrationality, and of the madness of extremism in a multi-ethnic and multi-purpose nation without core values. In such a summit, it is fists that talk, and autistic fury reigns supreme. Have bombs and will travel. This is the summit we are more likely to have if care is not taken. The summit of extremists may well be at hand. Fifty-one years after flag independence from Britain and almost a hundred years after amalgamation, the nation remains a notion; a fictive possibility in the imagination of the Black behemoth, while the state is put on permanent notice by centrifugal forces bent on having their way. A national and nationalist elite remains largely absent in the face of unsympathetic undertakers. Meanwhile, what we must fear most, a coalescence of extremism, appears more and more inevitable. How did we dribble our way to this historic cul de sac? This is not mere hysterical scaremongering or an unwarranted peep into the horoscope of disaster. Last year on the fiftieth anniversary of the nation, the Nigerian bomb purportedly procured on the order of dissident insurgency, made its way to the Eagle Pavillion in Abuja with dire consequences. This year, the fear of the Boko Haram bomb sent the Nigerian state hiding in the innermost sanctuary of Aso Rock. The state fled from its persecutors. It doesn’t get more state-disabling and sovereignty-dissolving than that. A feisty Commander-inChief with the necessary nous and the critical awareness of the immense symbolic possibilities of such an occasion would have deployed all the awesome capacities of the modern Nigerian state to face down its tormentors. This has nothing to do with being a lion or a leopard. For these things have their inflationary logic. The more you give, the more it demands until you give up yourself. As a piece of icing on the cake and in the most extreme and daring
• Eagle Square, Abuja act of state-subversion, Boko Haram actually declared the head of the state internal security wanted and placed a huge price on his head. If this were to be some bizarre lore out of the rarified stratosphere of magical realism, even Gabriel Garcia Marquez would have been humbled. But it is not. Since something new always comes out of Africa, welcome to the first multi-state nation. Yet as if nothing has happened, President Goodluck Jonathan, with his trademark cheery countenance and amiable insouciance , showed up a few days later in Kigali with a rumoured oversized human luggage. But since the time of extremism is also involuntarily accompanied by much laughter and forgetting, there is nothing anybody can do about that one. Give this one to Jonathan. There is something truly chilling and unnerving about his unflappable composure. The legendarily lucky man probably knows something that is beyond the comprehension of us lesser mortals. What remains is for us to bring up for dishonorable mention, the forces of extremism that are bent on taking Nigeria to the cleaners, and their mutually reinforcing momentum. As citizens of an ethnically cleaved and religiously divided nation, Nigerians may be powerless in the face of their evil machinations. There may as yet be no critical mass or the pan-Nigerian multitude to put them where they properly belong in the dustbin of history. But this must not stop us from showing them up in the gallery of villains. First are the ethnic extremists. They are those who believe that Nigeria is the estate of their ancestors and must be permanently misruled by them. They have never reconciled with reality and the stark actuality of a Jonathan presidency. Bitterly and deviously engaged in a proxy war of state destabilization, they are bent on teaching Jonathan a lesson by making life impossible for him. Since power is the only industry they
know, this has been their modus operandi whenever the power equation slips from their hands. Unfortunately, they represent no one but their own vested and entrenched economic interests. It is a sublime irony that blinded by sheer greed and gluttony, they cannot even realize that to all intents and purposes, and given his political and ideological inclination, Jonathan ought to be their blue-eyed boy. There is nothing in Jonathan to suggest even remotely that he would disturb or disrupt the status quo. But then, there are status quos and there is ethnic status quorum and a tree trunk does not become a crocodile simply because it has spent some time in water. The second group of extremists are those who believe that Nigeria should be ruled forever and in luckless perpetuity by a single party no matter its ideological and political bankruptcy. These are the apostles of the Third Reich. Fortunately or unfortunately, this is not an ethnic coalition but a pan-Nigerian congregation of bandits and buccaneers. Looting is their motto and rigging the motor of all activities. It does not matter to them if Nigeria and its accursed electorate are abolished in the process of disreputable elections. Tragically and happily, the law and logic of state banditry has introduced a sharp division and bitter rancour in their fold and the falcon can no longer hear the falconer. But this sharp division and bitter disaffection has also introduced a sense of panic and desperation into the ascendant faction. It has made it to resort to self-help and vote-grabbing even in circumstances where it didn’t need to. You can only get away with this kind of electoral larceny in a tame and colluding environment. It is this reality that has goaded and panicked poor Jonathan into adding the scalp of the judiciary to the morgue of institutional casualties. This is like shooting one’s self in the foot as pending and future electoral disputes will strive in vain for credibility and legitimacy. In a bitterly divided polity, this is akin to deliberately courting anarchy and chaos. The anarchy and chaos may well be with us if we are to go by the menace of the third group of extremists. These are the religious extremists who are bent on imposing their vision of paradise or the righteous so-
Okon takes small chop to Abuja
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O man, they say, is a hero to his valet. So it has been with snooper and Okon Anthony Okon. As his service years lengthen, Okon has transformed from cook to companion and from servant to local savant. The crazy boy’s awful temerity grows by leap and bound. On Saturday as snooper lounged in bed after a night of torrential downpour, Okon shambled in carrying a huge serving basket containing a smaller one. Before snooper could ask any question, the mad boy had launched into a destabilizing offensive. “Oga, I dey smell dem rat for this una room,” the boy opened with a straight face. As snooper made a frantic gesture to get up, the mad boy gestured to him to calm down. “No be dat kind rat. Na woman I dey smell and na Yoruba woman. You no say I sabi dem Sosorebia oil.” “Okon, you will please leave this room at once,” snooper screamed at the crazy boy. “Haba oga, as mama don vamoose, I know say madu no be wood,
even Tiger Wood sef no be wood,” the mad boy crowed with a sly wink. “Shut up,” snooper screamed as he sprang up to throw the boy out. Startled by the forceful reaction, Okon had to hold on firmly to his strange basket. “In fact are you not taking my food to those vagabonds again?” snooper angrily queried. “No oga no be dat. I wan reach Abuja quick quick.” The crazy boy offered with a smirk on his face. “To do what?”, snooper growled but mightily relieved that Okon was up to his usual pranks. “I wan go give Gbenga Daniel small chop for EFCC Kirikiri. Dem say him send one Ibo boy go buy am water and bread from Lugbe and dat one come vamoose into dem Okija forest,” the mad boy drawled. “I see. And what is in the other basket?” snooper demanded hiding his mirth. “Na pepper soup for Joe boy. I come put plenty efinrin for dat one. As dem Boko Haram come drive dat one inside Patience him room, I say
man pikin be man pikin,” the mad boy drawled with satanic relish. “But Jonathan is in Kigali,” snooper noted. “Ha oga dat one na America wonder, na him double. Him dey for bedroom,” Okon submitted only to resume his wild, subversive commentary. “Oga dem say baba come go near dem Daniel window for night and him come dey sing, “Ori okere konko l’awo. Oga wetin be dat?” “It means the stupid squirrel’s skull is inside the plate,” snooper offered. “Kai, kai, dis ogbologbo Baba sef,” Okon noted with wary admiration. “Okon, what did baba say about Alao Akala?” snooper asked, succumbing to mischief. “Dem say after dem come remove dem yeye bangle and dem goldsmith jagajaga from dat one, Baba come dey murmur, ‘Alao s’enia, Alao s’enia’ and dem Farina woman come ask Baba to shut up”. On that note, snooper drove out the mad boy.
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nooping around With
Tatalo Alamu ciety on all irrespective of faith. Suddenly, Nigeria is crawling with fanatics and fundamentalists of all hues. In a fundamental sense, their yearnings are a sad reminder of the failure of earthly authorities to deliver. Let us get this clear. The argument about whether Nigeria is a multi-religious state is nonsense and bunkum. The modern nation-state is a secular proposition and derives its grundnorm from its secularity. All theocratic nations exist in gross violation and grand contradiction of the imperative of the modern nation. This is why theocracy is incompatible with liberal democracy which is the greatest by-product of the imperative of the modern nation. The infamous picture of Jonathan in abject supplication before a religious authority ought to have been seen as a dangerous threat to the secularity of the state. The beauty of a functioning democracy however lies in the fact that the electorate are left to deliver the final judgment on the wisdom or otherwise of such pentecostal posturing. The Boko Haram is altogether a different proposition. Without any apology, its proponents and adherents seek to impose a theocratic order on a multi-religious nation. This is a fundamental assault on the very basis of the nation. Unlike all other insurgencies which seek a political solution to our endemic crisis of nationhood, the Boko Haram seeks a religious solution which abolishes the dynamic differences and diversities of the multi-national nation. If they succeed, it is goodbye to liberal democracy and indeed the nation as we know it. This is a more potent mutant of the sharia gambit. But there is a class basis to this revolt of the northern underclass which cannot be ignored by the rest of the country and which ought to be viewed with the empathy and sensitivity it deserves. In philosophy, this is called overdetermination, a situation in which multiple contradictions jostle for contention without the benefit of monocausal complacency. While the Boko Haram sect is against the Nigerian state as religiously constituted, it is also against the northern ruling class as politically constituted. Over the years, the northern multitude have watched as the so-called Westernization and selective education have brought nothing but further immiseration and pauperization. The economic injustice in the north cries to high heavens. The tiny feudal elite have fed fat on the toil and misery of their people without being able to provide any justification for secular governance. The social brutalization and dehumanization are such that they provide an ideal and idyllic habitat and a fertile breeding ground for messianic suicide bombers who have nothing to lose but their shabby and miserable existence. After all, in their toxic indoctrination, the world beyond is a moveable feast of wine, women and plentiful venison. Tragically enough, rather than coming up with a serious road map for the emancipation of the Nigerian underclass, rather than furnishing the nation with a massive Marshal plan for the amelioration of the plight of the Nigerian people and the northern masses in particular, Jonathan has been persuaded to buy into an economic regimen that can only compound and worsen the woes of the underclass. This is why and where the fourth group of extremists, the eco-
nomic extremists, represent the clearest danger to Nigeria as it is currently constituted. If the government lacks the will to go after economic saboteurs and all those who have contributed to the economic adversity of the nation, it has no moral justification to pass the bill of inefficiency to the people. The petroleum subsidy argument is a violent fraud perpetrated against the Nigerian populace since the military inquisition of General Ibrahim Babangida. The fact that they are still talking about a phantom subsidy twenty five years after ought to have alerted Jonathan that he was in for a massive heist. The idea of a permanent subsidy to be removed at will when the wages of corruption and state prodigality come calling does not do justice to economic literacy or social justice. And when the removal of non-existent subsidy becomes the cure-all economic orthodoxy of succeeding governments, we might as well wonder aloud with General Babangida as to why the economy has not collapsed. This subsidy palaver may well provide the necessary spark and the tipping point into anarchy and social chaos. For years we have argued that subsidy only exists in the malarial imagination of World Bank economic hit-men and hatchetwomen. It is a permanent trap for irresponsive and irresponsible governments. The massive largesse accruing will end up in private pockets which in turn will fuel inflation which in turn will lead to involuntary devaluation of the currency and which will lead to strident calls for another round of subsidy removal. Meanwhile, underdevelopment and further miseries will proceed apace. The already de-industrialised and economically depressed North will suffer worse, fuelling the emergence of more violent anti-secular sects. It is clear that for our economic experts sexing up the balance sheet of fiscal mendacity is more important than actual growth and the well-being of the populace. At first, they came with the argument that a bottle of coke was more expensive than a bottle of petrol, as if that was a crime in an oil producing country. Why don’t they remove the subsidy on water and air? When Ghana unilaterally decreed that the new cedi would be at par with the dollar, nothing happened. Except that inflationary pressures on the Ghanaian economy virtually disappeared overnight. Today, the new cedi is holding up very well against the dollar and Ghana is yet to go into full-scale petroleum exporting. It is the difference between a patriotic national elite and a gangster cartel. Ghana has gone indeed. Nigeria is totally at the mercy of extremist forces with Jonathan a witting and willing pawn. When you factor the Boko Haram threat into economic ,political and ethnic extremism, the situation is very dire indeed. Many voted for Jonathan in the belief that he possesses the calm equanimity to prepare Nigeria for a major surgery even as he stabilizes the patient. If he does not want to be the last president of Nigeria, let him place a moratorium on this subsidy project and prepare instead for an economic and political summit that will furnish a genuine roadmap for the redemption of the country. The alternatives are too scary to contemplate.