Category: Opinion

Muhammadu Buhari may yet end his Presidency like Emperor Nero, who Tacidus records as playing the fiddle while Rome burned for six days. Emperor Nero was decadent and widely unpopular, so is Buhari, except in the most illiterate quarters of Northern Nigeria. While Emperor Nero spent his day playing the fiddle, it is not certain what Buhari spends his day doing, besides the mandatory five prayers of a good muslim.

The country he fought so hard to lead has been left unattended to, it’s unity dismembered, it’s peace raped, it’s security taken over by usual and unusual strangers, while the economy and well being of the citizens have been auctioned in an open bazaar of hate, division and bloodletting. A country never before united now sits on the precipice of dismemberment, while the disimilar inhabitants chant war songs and threaten fire and thunder.

How does this President spend his day at work? Does he open the files atop his ornate desk? Does he listen to security briefings? Does he read the papers? Does he watch television? Does he receive his appointees in audience? Does he attend meetings? What exactly does our president do all day long? One can’t even ask Garba Shehu, because what he says is sooner unsaid, and what he signals is usually eventually unsignalled. Or does the President, like Emperor Nero also have a cute little fiddle tucked somewhere in the cascading folds of his usually white, well starched gowns?

Patrick Wilmot, the firebrand Jamaican born lecturer in Sociology at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, saw the impending collapse of a country that should never have been, he wrote furiously about it in the New Nigerian newspaper and was abducted by soldiers in the night and sent out of the country. When Karl Maier, the West African correspondent of the Independent, who also freelanced for The Economist and The WashingtonPost, wrote “This House Has Fallen..Nigeria In Crisis”, a commentary about the slow death of Nigeria, he was also banned from entering Nigeria. They couldn’t do anything about Chinua Achebe though, even after he wrote “There Was A Country”, chronicling the Biafran war, the coming of age and destruction of Nigeria, because Achebe is our local hubris with nowhere to be sent to.

Is it our national character to always live in denial, and rent the banner of our national reality? And lie to ourselves and our children, wishing things done undone, creating the verisimilitude of truth, but not the whole truth? Denying that we have remained a country of competing nationalities. Denying the war drums reverberating across the ethnic lines and the partisanship of the federal government in the impending discordance. Denying that the forests of Nigeria have been overtaken by militiamen of Fulani ethnic stock. Denying that we have no constitution and no country. Denying that the president is an ethic bigot and a believer in the hegemony of his own tribe. Denying that his government has become a coterie for acquisitive individualism and conspicuous consumption. Denying even, that the Boko haram insurgents are still alive, well and potent as a fighting force.

Yet the president of Nigeria can learn a lot from Paul Kagame of Rwanda, whose circumstances are akin to those of Nigeria. The Tutsis, like the Fulani are tall, slender with long noses. Like the Fulani they are pastoralists, while the Hutus are farmers. The Tutsis were favoured by the colonizing Belgians and given political advantage over the Hutus, even though they are smaller in population, just like the colonizing British favoured the Fulani, who are fewer and gave them political control. The Hutus hated the Tutsis because of their unfair advantage, just as the tribes in Nigeria hold the Fulani in contempt and suspicion because of their unfortunate claim to superiority and ownership of all Nigeria. Like Nigeria, Rwanda survived a genocide that took the lives of over one million people. In Nigeria there were more deaths in the Biafran genocide.

However, President Paul Kagame has set aside the historical circumstances of his country and built a new Rwanda based on constitutional equity and equality of all tribes. Rwanda today represents the African fairytale, an industrial success with a booming economy having long healed the wounds of 1994. A benevolent dictator, Kagame’s greatest achievement in the end will be that he united all Rwandans and gave them a country to be proud of and to look up to. On the contrary, the president of Nigeria pursues the growth, prosperity and domination of his ethnic Fulani and Northern muslims over the rest of the country, skewing appointments in their favour and investing them with the facade of superiority and invincibility.

Nelson Mandela is remembered today not essentially because he fought for black South Africans, but because he used his victory to institute racial harmony, forgiveness and power sharing even when he had the opportunity to be vindictive and divisive, and to encourage social injustice to the advantage of his African people. Every great nationalist must necessarily rise above the sentiments of tribe, region and religion, and this is what president Muhammadu Buhari has found impossible to do. Yet he has a great opportunity to do so, even now, before the writers of history make his name a byword and consign the sorry patch of his presidency to the abyss of damnation and atrophy.

Dominic kidzu writes from Calabar.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article is strictly that of Dominic Kidzu and does not represent the opinion of The Lumine News or it’s agent.

Now here is a spectacular product of a unique phenomenon, mostly grown in third – world African countries. By the way, aren’t African countries almost all third world, with failing economies, tattered political fabrics, bloated nouveau riche – without agricultural or industrial production, atomistic ethnic groupings and cantankerous fanatical religious convictions? The “loyalist” in Africa is a dramatic archetype originating from both congenital and circumstancial disorders in the socio – economic and psycho – political system.

Even though they are grown all year round in all the countries of Africa and flourish mostly in seasons of economic strangulation, their main vegetation is in tropical politics, where they are known to flourish in peak season, like Chinua Achebe’s yam tendrils in the rainy season. They arise from a variation of slightly disimilar backgrounds which are tied together by the will to survive, even to live, and the drive to prosper against all odds.

Diligent research has shown that they are either, school drop – outs, cultists, drug addicts, kleptomaniacs, people with low self – esteem, victims of long years of poverty, offsprings of unbalanced parenting, exconvicts, demagogues, social misfits, and wait for it … even unfulfilled geniuses! For people who fall in this broad categorisation” loyalty ” has become both a profession and a science. A means of livelihood, a bridge to success, a meal ticket, a place to carve out an identity for oneself, however nefarious in complexion and shameful in it’s disposition. There are yet those who have become “loyalists” as victims of the socioeconomic and political system which have sucked them into the mire and putrefaction of its architecture, travelling wherever the wind bends their wing, while remaining firmly on the leash, with minimal reward, less they break free from the agonising shackles of their own unique imprisonment. These are themselves “loyalists ” and also “victims” of loyalty. For them it is a sponge dripping with Socrates’ hemlock which they must drink to quench their taste, and then to die! Someone once argued that there is a relationship between money and power, and that impoverishment is a measure of political control. Could this be true?

To be a “loyalist ” it is important to gorge out one’s brains and replace them with sand, to suspend disbelieve, to embrace alternative reality, to deify the boss, emperor or potentate and every nomenclature of excellencies, to tell them only what they want to hear. That is why Museveni is still popular in Zambia, Theodoro Nguema Mbasogo loved in Guinea Equitorial, Paul Biya the subject of poetic pynaegyrics in Cameroun. Even our own President Buhari is a great hero, so says the “loyalists “. Yet the “loyalists ” have done more damage to continental Africa and to all its its peoples than colonialism and military interventions ever wrought upon the people.

And because human beings are by nature both sociopolitical and competitive, and even the primates from which the human species might have evolved practiced an attenuated form of politics, ” loyalty” has become a veritable means of gaining advantage over others, not capacity, knowledge, expertise, hardwork, or qualification. Max Weber’s position that modern society is individualistic, egalitarian, market and merit driven has been overcome by agnatic kinship organisation or the tyranny of cousins in Africa where kinship ties have become the main source of social solidarity. Alexis de Tocqueville and Thomas Jefferson’s prodigious treatises on the equality of man as the inexorable experience of the growth of mankind has since been washed away by rapacious despots at all levels of governance in Africa. Like the Arabian, Ottoman, Chinese and Byzantine oligarchs, governments are controlled by a shadow network of stacked turtles and cousins, and an inner court of henchmen hidden beneath the vinear of “loyalty “.

The heart of the “loyalist “, to use the words of Mark Twain, “is a cesspool of falsehood, of treachery, and of low and devilish instincts”. The “loyalist ” harbours no redeeming moral graces, no scruples, no tingling conscience, no feelings beyond the alluring touch of goldcoins, ala Silas Manner, or crisp notes, and the dizzying smell of new mint. Money, position, office, advantage and power are their molten gods and carved deities. And once the certain reign of sitting the king is ended, the “loyalists” promptly migrate like egrets to another victim, the new king. They are like herdsmen, or birds of the sky, with no permanent abode. Their “loyalty ” is also itinerant, constantly in search of pasture and water, leaving behind them a scorched earth laid waste by their “loyalty”. Mankind will surely know more peace, progress and prosperity were it not for the pernicious and invasive”loyalists “.

Dominic kidzu writes from Calabar, Cross River State.