FORTY TWO YEARS ON, POLITICAL DISORDER IS THE ORDER
By
Nigeria celebrates its forty second anniversary on the stretcher reserved for invalid nations in the ward of permanent political emergency. Bandaged and battered, like a victim of multiple mishaps, and with a thousand drips keeping the end out of sight, it is not a pretty sight at all. Wracked by an endemic and wearisomely familiar crisis of governance and orderly succession, the sirens have long ceased to announce its return to the casualty ward. It is a classic case of medical familiarity breeding clinical contempt. Nigeria is a modern miracle of anarchic resilience. No nation has taken this long to put itself out of a miserable existence , or to find the sterling strength and will for a purposeful and tolerable existence for that matter. The colonial masters have created a monstrosity which will haunt the civilized world for a very long time.
As independence anniversary approached, the national mood, then, is of deep gloom; of pervasive disquiet and unease; of an impending cataclysm the like of which had never been witnessed even by the severe standards of the nation? bloody and turbulent history. This is quite understandable. With insecurity stalking the land leading to abridged productivity and massive capital flight, with the national currency on an epochal tailspin, with the political process and the transition to true democracy clamped in a truly sinister gridlock, and with the entire political ensemble entranced in a St Vitus dance of irreversible self-destruction, it is tempting to conclude with cynics that Nigeria has never had it so bad. But this is like choosing between a flea and a louse. Nigeria has never had it good, thanks to its constitutive illogic as an arbitrary block hewn off central Africa, and the kind of men and women such an arrangement must throw up in the main. Meanwhile, as the nation heaves and lurches like an elephant about to topple, the political criminati, its ranks swollen by new recruits and other apprentice felons, is engaged in mutual recriminations and hostage-taking . Yet unless there is collective restraint, or the intervention of the providential master-mason that has always saved the nation from itself, both hostages and their takers may disappear in a spiral of superior violence whose hazy outlines can already be glimpsed by the far-sighted. The vision of disoriented refugees clogging the coastal highway all the way to Monrovia and beyond ought to concentrate the mind.
Let it be clear that no one is deceived by the propaganda that all this is about saving "nascent" democracy or restoring accountability, probity and honour to the terminally dishonorable. Behind it all is politics, not as an ennobling vocation for the amelioration of human misery, or an edifying craft for nudging humanity and history forward from the abyss of bestiality; but what has been identified as the politics of the belly in its most primordial and punitive persuasion. Driven by sub-human greed and avarice, glutinous men and women have eaten the nation out, and are about to turn on themselves in the feeding frenzy of sewage rats. If these are great Nigerians who have suffered a catastrophic moral decline, one would have understood. But these hustlers are not even the heroes of the minimal democratic space won at great political cost and with the blood of many martyrs. The great irony is that in the hour of national need, except for a handful of t! hem, the vast majority of the current actors, from the presidency through the federal executive to the legislature, could be found in the template of tyranny ministering unto power gone berserk. To task such a dismal rabble with the onerous responsibility of national reorientation and redemption is a joke that has gone too far indeed. Postcolonial politics is too serious a business to be left to the Nigerian professional politician.
Yet given the reality of power configuration in contemporary Nigeria, it is not a question of whether one likes the political class or doesn't, for a way will still have to be found through them, or around them as the case may be. This is the great conundrum of our time. A harshly monetised polity is a perfect proliferating environment for political gangsters, scoundrels and Ghana-must-go baggers. Money talks, and despite the hollow ritual of queuing and voting, the vast majority of the people are disempowered and disconnected onlookers in a play of fiscal giants. It is an elite power game disembodied from the actual lived experience of the nation; a charade of chaotic colour in which dazzling form masks evacuated content, and in which agents of a dissolute and discredited status quo ennoble themselves as catalysts of change. Hypocritical grandstanding and the sanctimonious humbug of the fraudulent lay preacher is the order of service in a triumphant processional of the doomed.
With such a grim scenario playing itself out in the background, it is no wonder that Nigeria is at the brink again. But to discerning analysts, this is no news. Except for brief interventions of clarity and sanity, Nigeria has always been at the brink. It is a classic study in national brinkmanship, in perpetual crisis, willed self-destruction and dramatic reprieve seconds before the executioner? axe. Fundamentally rigged against a rational and ordered existence, political disorder has become Nigeria? organising principle, its organon, the ordering logic behind a chaotic and illogical actuality. Rumours about its impending demise may well be an exaggeration, but no one is sure of when its extraordinary luck will run out, or when its guiding muse will pull the plug in a final gesture of divine exasperation. Having lived dangerously from its test tube conception and ever after its precarious delivery, flirtations with suicide is the national sports.
For President Olusegun Obasanjo, second executive civilian president of Nigeria, retired four-star general and former member of the Eminent Persons Group, these are not the best of times. Whatever the impression management and the spin, it is clear from the body language that even a man with his profound appetite for impossible challenges must have come to the private conclusions that this time around, he has bitten more than he can chew. Almost within earshot of an imperial civilian presidency, the complex political configuration of Nigeria and his opponents malign skills have driven him into a precipitate retreat. As they seek to crowd him out of contention or render him combat-ineffective, as they seek to humiliate him on the political chessboard, barring which they intend to break the board itself, it is clear that the former military ruler will need more than a dose of his legendary luck. If he wins and manages to reassert himself, it is surely going to be a pyrrhic victory as the nasty dogfight would have eroded much of his national authority and credibility, leaving him a lame duck ruler. If he loses, he would have been thoroughly demystified and stripped of his aura as a nationalist and incorruptible patriot. Having taken a full measure of their man, it would seem that those who tempted him out of retirement have handed him a poisoned chalice.
Such then is the enormity of the crisis that unless Obasanjo reinvents himself or rearranges Nigeria structurally, he risks going under in humiliating defeat in the hands of the same forces responsible for his current ascendancy. Given a mindset steeped in the authoritarian military command and obey structure and his own personal autocratic disposition, it is all but impossible for the retired general to reinvent himself. And given his aversion for structural reform, his privileging of the "good" governance paradigm over institution-building, his old statist and centralising temperament ,any attempt to alter the current Nigerian reality will amount to a conceptual and pragmatic suicide. If this represents a convergence of vision between an authoritarian Obasanjo and his feudal and fundamentalist tormentors, it also demonstrates why you cannot step into the same river twice. For while Obasanjo continues to invoke the old conservative paradigm that bound! the ancient coalition together, his principal collaborators, frightened by a radical loss of hegemony and driven by the imperative of group survival , have since moved on to a rearguard realignment of existing reality through the sharia time bomb preparatory to a definitive show down with emergent revolutionary forces in the Nigerian polity. Caught in a time-warp, and without a genuine pan-Nigerian constituency, Nigeria second executive civilian president is left flailing and floundering in a no man land. It is a cruel and arbitrary fate, but it shows that there is a time for everything.
It is within this grim context that the current crisis must be located. Stripped of its mystifications and manic pretensions, the impeachment saga is nothing but a shorthand for the crisis of orderly succession that has bedevilled the country since independence. But behind it lies something more fundamental: the disintegration of elite consensus and the final collapse of the Obasanjo Settlement. When Obasanjo took over on that glorious morning of May 1999, there were many who felt that Nigeria has finally reconnected with her immanent destiny after decades of military brutality and misrule which stretched the social and political fabric of the nation to its limits. Alas, never has a mood of national euphoria evaporated in such a hailstorm of mutual recriminations. Such is the schizophrenic nature of the country that while those who voted for Obasanjo are shouting foul, those who didn't are screaming murder! But there were the few wise ones who saw from the beginning the unpropitious provenance of Obasanjo's ascendancy and how his presidency might have been hobbled from source.
Often in its checkered history, Nigeria has had to contend with military and civilian leaders who had overstayed either their welcome, level of competence or the original consensus that brought them to power. After the rigged federal elections of 1964 and 1983, it was clear that Malam Abubukar Tafawa Balewa and Alhaji Usman Shehu Shagari had reached the limits of their competence as far as providing solutions to the national crisis unleashed by their acts of commission and omission. But while agitations for their removal or replacements were led by opposition parties, the ruling parties maintained their cohesion and organic unity till the bitter end. Indeed, the Chairman of the ruling party in the Second Republic, Chief Augustus Meredith Adisa Akinloye, famously warned that the only other viable opposition party was the military. And so it became. The startling novelty of the current crisis is that this is the first time in the history of Nigeria that ! agitations for the retirement or removal of an incumbent president would be led from within his own party, and the first time such a ruling party would suffer a dramatic implosion in a publicly enacted suicide pact.
There are four major reasons for this curious development, and their all linked together and mutually reinforcing. First, the nature and character of the military that midwived the transition. Second, the nature of the transition itself. Thirdly, the nature of the dominant political party. Finally, the nature and personality of its standard bearer. The military that supervised the current transition was no longer a national or nationalist arbiter, but an institution in disorderly retreat, its dominant faction having disgraced and dishonoured itself. Its main preoccupation was to indemnify itself against future inquisitions and reprisals and identify a fall-guy to provide cover while it staggered back to the barracks. Hence, the amalgam of discordant personalities in the main party. Hence, the foisting on the nation a constitution which is a patchwork of incoherent rambling and authoritarian malice. Hence, retired General Obasanjo fresh from a dungeon befitting an ill-starred subaltern rather than a distinguished former head of state. Not even completely trusting their political recruit, the darkroom technicians worked in enough structural and personnel disincentives to shorten the leash once their restless captive awoke from the dreamland of delusion.
It is against this background of crippling constraints that some of the early decisions of the Obasanjo administration ought to be applauded for their courage and sagacity. The loud noise from a section of the country that greeted the retirement of political officers and the correction of the lopsided nature of federal appointments showed the hypocrisy behind the Obasanjo .Settlement and its foundation in mutual deceit. It would have been impossible for Obasanjo to maintain the old status quo, or establish some legitimation for his tenure without these tinkerings. But having gained a respite and bought himself a breathing space, it would appear that defects of vision and the president? least lovable traits, particularly an arrogance and insensitivity now compounded by messianic delusions and a disdain for superior intellect, began to get in the way. His puritanical posturing and prickly preachments began to grate badly on the old guard which beg! an to plot his comeuppance, while his blithe and off-handed dismissal began to alienate thousands of patriotic Nigerians who had actually fought for democracy and who felt he was not in a position to lecture them on morality and patriotism.
Thus while alienating members of his natural constituency, Obasanjo was also driving away visionary Nigerians, the catalysts for radical and regenerative changes in the polity, gathering around himself a personality cult of outstanding mediocrity full of political mercenaries and sundry charlatans. His abiding lack of faith in institution-building, his lingering affection for the one-party formula which has bred civilian tyrants all over the continent, his delusive belief that he is God? gift to Nigeria has led to deliberate and profound destabilization of the three parties, further exposing their contradictions and hollowness, beginning with his tinkering with the natural choice of his party for senate leadership, the attempted decapitation of APP, the factionalisation of the AD and infiltration of Afenifere, and the Bola Ige tragedy. But a man can make for himself a throne of bayonet, whether he will be able to sit in it is another matter.
The chickens have all come to roost, with the Obasanjo presidency gravely imperilled frantically searching for new alliances having allowed opposition forces to coalesce into a coalition of the aggrieved. This is not a battle between good and evil but a collision of contradictory forces which will showcase the moral, spiritual and political bankruptcy that fathered the Fourth Republic. Long in coming to the politically discerning, the crisis has caught the Yoruba old guard off guard with sections of it betraying a poverty of political imagination so severe that it bespeaks the final unravelling of the old order. Not being privy to Obasanjo current ascendancy, the outcome cannot be determined by vain militant posturing. Indeed the more they try to ethnicise the impasse, the more they drive other forces into their ethnic trenches thus further endangering Obasanjo and his presidency. The recourse to ethnic sabre-rattling can only infuriate other f! orces who feel, rightly or wrongly, that they have retired their political obligation to the Yoruba after the June 12 fiasco.
In the beginning was disorder? If anything, the momentous events of the past three years have confirmed the diagnosis that Nigeria suffers from a fundamental structural disequilibrium which cannot be corrected by cosmetic surgery. Having spurned honest advice to keep his eyes firmly on the bull and not to get distracted by the vanities of office, the matador in Abuja must be wondering where it will all end.
Nov 2002