MONDAY LINES Elections and vultures of war 28.Jul.2014 Lasisi Olagunju William Butler Yeats shouldn’t have lived in 20th century Irish society. He should have lived in Nigeria of today with all the turmoil, cheap death and expensive investigations that lead nowhere . The poet belonged to an age of artistic beauty, of rhyme and of poignant symphony. Even then, amid the resonant harmony in the art of those days was general insecurity, death, tears and blood blighting the face of the earth. So, it was against the background of disharmony between the art - space and the chaos on ground that he wrote his famous “The second Coming”: - Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/ Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/ The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity/....Surely some revelation is at hand;... Read the last three verses above and agree with me that W.B.Yeats is today in our midst, alive. Whatever “anarchy” informed his poetry has paled into nothingness this moment when a whole plane-load of people disappear forever; 300 girls missing in a careless, carefree celebratory space, senseless wars waged by the deranged the world over making millions not just homeless, but strangely, stateless. In times like this when ravening clouds take over the sky, what should we do? Now that horrifying and horrific events compete for space everywhere, every time and there is just no indication that anyone has the will or the capability to do just anything to stem the tide, what do we do? In troubled Ukraine, MH17 went down with human parts of 129 people thrown 15km wide. Among those parts were those of an only child of a forlorn gentleman somewhere in Malaysia. With that international sorrow came the report of a military helicopter crashing in troubled Borno State, Nigeria. The first sad news of that crash was: two dead, one rescued; then, a day after: one rescued, one dead, one missing. And, just two hours after that, we were elatedly told the almost very good news: in that military helicopter crash, out of the three on board, two were rescued, one dead. Whatever happened, a least it was cheery (and cheering) enough that the one thought dead was, indeed, among the living. But, wait, outside the shores of Nigeria, two days after the Nigerian tragedy, 116 passengers aboard an Algerian plane, again, crashed out of life in troubled Mali. In the Middle East, almost 1,000 people, majority of them women and children, are dead, murdered in a needless, mad war between Israel and Palestine. Tragedy, death and blood everywhere, and yet, the end is not here... At about the same time, whole clans and villages and towns got wiped out in war-wracked north-east Nigeria. And in north-west Nigeria, bombs raced through the streets of Kaduna and Kano in pursuit of a goal clearly against the maintenance of Nigeria’s tenuous stability. Deadly Ebola spotted with red alert in Lagos of complacent residents. Across the south-west, we see strange, alien faces riding okada (some with no clue at all of anywhere where they operate) and we do not see any reason to sound alarm bells of emergency. In a climate of all -pervading fear like this, what should humans do? As it is abroad, so it is at home. Those who are to act against fear do not have the time and the will. They are moving with frenetic speed towards the next election that will refuel the vehicles of their reign of devastation. That is all that matters now across all political parties. Fear, naked fear, may impetuously strut the land like NASA’s Rover does the red surface of planet Mars, who cares? From this week on, all energy and attention are converging and will soon, certainly, clash in Osun State where, in less than two weeks, an epochal, defining election will take place. The blood pressure of Abuja and Lagos over that state has already reached crisis level. Why? Is it all about the people or just about power for its own sake or about money or about the conquistador keeping his property or about some little-minded, rapacious local Vladimir Putin looking for his own Crimea to annex? The steam that oozes out of (and into) that place induces fear of the unimaginable. Those who have the wings “and the soaring swiftness of the eagle” are out, fleeing already. They stoke the fire of fear, tears and blood, then deftly step out of the war front for the disinherited to do mutual destruction. They leave the battle for the hapless to fight and lose to the power class. And yet, the powerful will be back after the storm to inherit the land and the throne with its repulsive riches. Now, what should he do, the ordinary man with nowhere to go? So, the coming August election is not just about Osun State, it is about Nigeria. The 2015 elections won’t just be about a president, some governors and 109 senators. They will be about the vast uncharted future of the country. These are what raised the stakes very high for the rich and the poor; the powerful and the powerless. Yeats wrote about “indignant desert birds” dropping shadows over the earth. If the poet was a prophet, I think his prophesy has come to pass here. The birds are here. Vultures of war have descended everywhere, north and south, feasting not just on the dead but more on the living. And they are not done with us yet. Even their children are queued up behind them, bidding their turn to more than take a bite. I hope the victim knows clearly, who the enemy is. I hope so.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 07:19:00 +0000
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