In Defence Of Nonsense

In Defence Of Nonsense

Sanley Macebuh is arguably the foremost Nigerian intellectual journalist of his generation. Having returned to the country in the late seventies after a distinguished career in the United States, both as a student and professor of literature, Macebuh quickly established a reputation as an intellectual of ideas. As the hazy outlines of civil rule appeared on the horizon, Macebuh might be excused for thinking that Nigeria was headed for the moon. The transition was being conducted with the traditional military virtues of precision, honour and integrity. In an incisive appraisal of one of the leading candidates, Macebuh posited that if the great Zik of Africa were to come to power, rhetorics would flourish in Nigeria. Alas, the Second Republic turned out not to be a rhetoricians' elysium but a buccaneers' bazaar. Macebuh was to get his own dose very early. A chance visit to Umaru Dikko's office by Macebuh saw the Admiral of the rice armada, red biro in hand, poring over an editorial Macebuh had just passed for publication. Nothing could have been more devastating. For Dikko, journalism is too serious a business to be left in the hands of journalists. Not long afterwards, Macebuh and his cigar-chomping boss got their marching order. A brief hibernation at The Punch saw Macebuh penning a piece whose title was to become a prophetic tragedy in the next two decades: "Future Imperfect''.

Twenty years after, the wheel has turned full circle, for both Macebuh and his former boss at the Daily Times are back as court intellectuals of the Fourth Republic with retired General Obasanjo himself presiding. Ordinarily, one would have expected a re-enactment of the old magic. But as the hidden hand of the god of institutional chaos and the head of Maradona subvert the most well-intentioned of measures, as the goal of national rejuvenation becomes more and more elusive, the normally urbane and courteous Macebuh is beginning to exhibit early symptoms of frayed nerves. A siege mentality is beginning to overpower our poor Stanley, the public mien is increasingly irascible; the interventions testy and touchy. The spin-doctor has become the spleen doctor. Nothing could be more fatal to a courtier, for it betrays a creeping desperation and collapse of faith in his own medium.

Macebuh's recent syndicated piece, "Less Sense, More Nonsense'' in which he appears to have scape-goated two of the noted young men of contemporary journalism as exemplars of the malaise afflicting the Nigerian media is a case in point. Buried in the volcanic lava of bile are two crucial issues: corruption and deregulation. Macebuh charges the press with an almost criminal complicity in the battle against the one, and of an unpatriotic offensive against the other. Let us briskly dispose of the first. That there is massive corruption in contemporary Nigerian press can no longer be denied, and the day may yet come when most things emanating from it will have to be taken with a pinch of salt. On a recent visit, one's sensibility was assaulted by all manners of allegations. There are reports of celebrated columnists being on retainership; of journalists being on the permanent pay roll of alternative employers; of publishers sneaking in anonymous reports in their own newspapers; of Ghana-must-go bags arriving at editorial suites after negotiated covers and staff writers collecting "mobilisation'' fees upfront.

Yet this is where Macebuh clutches at a straw, mistaking an epi-phenonmenon for the real thing and confusing the symptom with the disease. Corruption is indeed an indication of a deeper malaise, of a more fundamental institutional disorder. At a cynical, pragmatic level it may well be a new mode of redistribution of stolen wealth among Nigeria's political elite. A situation in which unlettered councillors earn more than emeritus professors; where the National Assembly has become a booty-sharing cartel and where a recently relieved regime insider cruises the federal capital in alternative jaguar sedans is not an ideal breeding ground for national probity rectitude.

But this is not usually the end of the story. Every social contradiction, by its very dynamics, throws up an opposition adequate to it. It was precisely at the point that Babangida felt he had neutralised Nigeria's dominant intellectual class that an alternative intelligentsia emerged at the barricades to fight him to a standstill. Ditto for Abacha and the Yoruba political elite. Despite its current dire straits, there are still oases of integrity and moral rectitude in the Nigerian media. In any national emergency, it is these who will take over from their compromised and fallen colleagues in the struggle for the redemption of Nigeria. It may be a long walk to freedom, but at least the very possibility should restore to Macebuh his fabled equanimity.

As for deregulation? Unfortunately, the celebrated stylist is on more slippery ground, theoretically and politically. Even in advanced societies, deregulation and its twin bogey of privatisation are not regarded as a cure-all panacea. They are part of a process, of an intrinsic regulator mechanism. Had it been otherwise, the government of the United States would not be engaged in a battle of wits with Bill Gates to break up his Microsoft empire. The rationale is never to allow an individual to become economically powerful enough to threaten the state and the nation.

The point that seems to escape Macebuh is that while in economically advanced societies privatisation often liberates human energy, creativity and initiative, in economically regressing societies, it is often a symptom of the failure of governance and the collapse of moral will. If you cannot deal with NEPA subversives, then privatise the monster. If you can only publish the names of petroleum saboteurs rather than bring them to justice, then throw the NNPC at them, preferably with a curse.

Luckily or unluckily, closing in from the shadows to answer the question for all of us is the formidable and indomitable figure of Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida. Babangida's return epitomises the ultimate working out of the logic of privatisation and the privatised state. His war-chest bulging and bursting from the dividends of "democracy'' and privatisation, there is nothing in the current structures that can stop him. On the contrary, they seem ready-made for him. As long as the game is played according to the rules of the existing paradigm, the Minna maestro is its master. Let no member of Nigeria's hypocritical political class and their retired military overlordship shed any crocodile tears at this development for they are all complicit in its secret dialectic and inner logic. Babangida, like the French emperors of yore, is proving to be more powerful than the state and is reducing its pretensions to merely shambolic buffoonery.

But since Babangida's ascendancy is predicated on economic and political violence against the nation, he is precisely vulnerable to contrary forces operating on the same parameter. The embryonic formations of these forces are already apparent and they do not reside in state houses and assemblies but on the streets, in the jungle, in the forlorn barracks of armed destitutes and the fetid mangrove swamps. As such, and unless something dramatic happens, Babangida can rule again only by placing entire sectors and sections of the nation on a permanent war-footing, in which case it is either the fledgling democracy or the nation itself that is going to be the major casualty. It is apocalypse very soon.

Even if only for the purposes of enlightened self-interest, this grim scenario ought to concentrate the mind of Stanley Macebuh. He may then discover that there may be a lot of sense in the "nonsense'' being written about the administration he had decided to adorn with his outstanding intellect. He himself once memorably wrote about barricades erected around Dodan Barracks during the Buhari era. Let him crawl out of the self-imposed barricades at Aso Rock. He may even be pleasantly surprised that many of the seeming adversaries are his professional children inspired by his glorious example. By doing that, he would have spared himself and the administration he serves further self-demystification.