The Fourth Republic in Crisis By Tatalo Alamu The Fourth Republic, or what we have somewhere else proposed as the Obasanjo Settlement, was tailor-made for a military strongman in civilian garb. It ought to be remembered that the military was never really conquered or subjugated by the NADECO rebellion. But it was clear that that the military had also exhausted their political and historical possibilities. Staying on would have been too costly and prohibitive and might have resulted in the eventual disintegration of the country. In order to withdraw from the scene with some dignity and with a semblance of honour and integrity, the military needed one of their own who would not allow the profession to be disgraced and hounded out of power, just like that. Better still if such a person had the political and moral authority of personal suffering and was a pan-Nigerian nationalist who was not sold on the political whimsies of his ethnic constituency. Obasanjo, the old Owu-born General who had been freshly sprung from Abacha’s humiliating dungeon, fitted the bill perfectly. He was one of their own who was not one of their own. As for the military ploy of looking for a compliant Yoruba who could pass, it exploded in their face as the Yoruba people saw through the gambit and roundly rejected their own. But to the extent that they also gave peace a chance and did not immediately commence another round of customary aluta or resort to their legendary war of legal nerves and attrition, the military gambit could be said to have succeeded in a circuitous manner. Whatever its worth, this was some elite pacting and consensus at work. However that may be, there was still a major problem. What made an Obasanjo, with his autocratic temperament and authoritarian outlook, a brilliant and sure bet for the project of demilitarization also made him particularly unsuitable for deepening the democratization process, more so in a nation emerging from the trauma of military despotism. Whether he likes to acknowledge it or not, Obasanjo’s self-succession and succession plots were a classic study in vengeance as statecraft. It has landed Nigeria in hot water. The Fourth Republic has become a nightmare of lost opportunities. Obasanjo’s policy of vengeful exclusion and the narrow social base of leadership recruitment in the country have led to the denial of public space to vibrant and visionary people who could have made sterling contribution to the rapid development and transformation of Nigeria. The result is the dramatic decline in the quality of leadership and poor governance that we are witnessing at the federal level and in most states of the federation. In order to sustain the illusion of order, ruling classes need an order of illusions. The disillusioned Nigerian populace appears to have seen through the grand chicanery, the illusionist fantasia, the buffooning pantomime, the mystifying fog of incompetence and brutish insensitivity. As a result of this, the government has come under severe pressure from the margins, from below and from the aggrieved factions of the factionalized and fractured elite. Government has lost its magic. Elites mediate between the state and direct mob control. In the traditional bastions of liberal democracy, elections are elite-driven mechanisms for effecting changes in leadership if and at when due. The elites retain the initiative to supervise the election and to superintend the outcome, based on elite consensus and cohesion. But where the angry multitude take direct charge of their destiny based on their perception of the moral and political collapse of the ruling class, the elite lose the power and capacity to superintend the outcome of elections. Hence, the foul and nasty atmosphere of rancor and disaffection currently subsisting in the country as elections approach. Hence, the imminent unraveling of the Fourth Republic. Hence, the looming apocalyptic meltdown of a nation that has consistently flirted with suicide ever since its emergence as a test tube baby of the colonial laboratory. The veil has been torn off and the aura of authority, power and prestige badly eroded. The Nigerian masses have sniffed blood. The calls for a shift or postponement of the elections such as credited to Sambo Dasuki in faraway Chatham House in London will not do. It is nothing but an imaginary resolution of a concrete political conundrum. Even if the elections are postponed for a year, the current foul atmosphere will still prevail as long as there is no demobilization of an already embedded and actively engaged mob. To do this, you need a degree of elite consensus and cohesion—- a circuitous no-brainer in the current circumstances. When you are faced with an impossible political conundrum, you reach for a paradox as a way out. As conceived by its military progenitors, the Fourth Republic has reached the end of its tethers. Only a massive transfusion of fresh blood and an injection of a new vision of the nation such as can come from counter-hegemonic forces and bearers of an antagonistic logic fundamentally at variance with the current status quo can rescue the tottering republic. Whether the ascendant faction of the Nigerian ruling class will allow constitutional change through peaceful election remains to be seen. The stiff and ever stiffening local body language and the stalling and stonewalling from Chatham House do not indicate a willingness to submit to the supreme will of the electorate. Yet when all is said, it is clear that a drastic change in governance paradigm in this much abused country cannot be postponed for much longer. It will be a typically Nigerian irony if the man who will clear the cobwebs and lay the foundation of genuine democracy, who will retrieve our lost girls and territory while institutionalizing accountable governance through devolution of power from the centre turns out to be another retired military strongman waiting in the wings for electoral clearance. No sane man has been known to argue with an earthquake. With the benefit of hindsight and in the absence of a strong, united, unified and countervailing nationalist political class which is the evil legacy colonial rule, the Fourth Republic is a military transition in progress from full military rule through some neo-military hybrid to a possible culmination in true civil rule, after the epoch of hybridization. This is the bane of all authoritarian societies in a state of traumatic transition to some form of modernity. The nearest examples of this kind of transition that come to mind are the far eastern countries, particularly South Korea which for a period was also under the spell and scourge of retired generals. But then, South Korea is a racially, culturally and religiously homogeneous country. Its ancient ruling caste stoutly withstood the ravages of Japanese colonization. Pity then the poor young man from Otuoke who was plucked as a callow apprentice by a deluded past master of political intrigues and thrown into a seething cauldron of ethnic, religious and regional animosities without a compass or a road map. So far, Jonathan has shown neither the granite strength of character, the psychological stamina and the gaming cosmopolitanism to rein in the fierce centrifugal forces nor the stirring helmsmanship to navigate a turbulent ocean brimming with sharks and piranhas. The events in his own imploding party show how far President Goodluck Jonathan has lost the plot. What remains is for him to negotiate a safe passage out of power with some honour but certainly not through the postponement of election or some other constitutional and extra-constitutional mischief which may well backfire. The omens are dire indeed. The lineage of political failure Posted by: Tatalo Alamu in Tatalo Alamu 13 hours ago After sixteen years of unbroken and uninterrupted respite during which it operated the longest stretch of civil rule in the country, the Nigerian political class has reverted to its default crisis mode; its nation-threatening and polity-disabling habitus. The fire this time is so huge in its prospects, so damning in its incendiary possibilities that care must be taken lest it consumes the entire nation. Like the French “pompier pyromane”, the Nigerian political class often take a perverted delight in setting fire to the house and then seeing to how best to put it out. They arrange for fire and then organize a ceasefire. While donning the toga of statesmen, they propose anticipatory truces even when they are furtively complicit with the shameless status quo. But then there are certain conflagrations which surpass the expectations and modest talents of their originators. Such fires tend to consume innocent victims as well as perverted pyromaniacs. To be sure, crises and conflicts are the motors that power societies as humankind evolve away from the state of nature. Even if it is not a product of some profound crisis which fractured the old arrangement, a nation must encounter crises as it faces fresh and novel political possibilities. To overcome the crippling conflicts, it is then left to human ingenuity to adapt to novel situations and unforeseen circumstances. But there are crises and there are crises. In many modern societies, periodic conflicts often erupt as a result of the inevitable struggle for power among factions of a political class whose worldview and notions of the nation are not essentially dissimilar. In such circumstances, an organic community requires only minor adjustments, minor compromises and elementary statecraft before such crises are resolved in the greater national interest. However in inorganic nations where disparate pre-colonial nationalities still habour and nurture fundamentally incompatible notions of the nation and indeed of the societies, crises of political succession often tend to degenerate into nation-threatening conflicts with the capacity to throw the entire nation back into a state of nature. In a situation such as obtains in contemporary Nigeria, a fundamental organogram of the nation which stringently stipulates national destiny and charter is imperative and inevitable. Something cannot be built on nothing. The inability of Nigeria to evolve into an organic nation is at the root of the violent struggles for political succession that we have witnessed since independence and even before it. Such has been the fate of the Nigerian state in its pre-military, military and neo-military incarnations. In the current conjuncture, the inability of the traditional hegemonic blocs to impose a solution -however transient–on the crisis such as has been the case in the first, second and military Third republic suggests the lurking presence of a third hegemonic force which is still inchoate and incoherent. However that may be, what remains to be seen is whether this third force, a chaotic combination of the dominant, residual and emergent tendencies, will come into rampart hegemony through elections, a future national conference, elite pacts or even revolutionary upheavals which may unfortunately eventuate in the chaotic dismemberment of the country. It is morning yet on creation day. What is not in doubt is the fact that as the presidential election shapes up and enters the last four weeks, Nigeria itself has entered uncharted waters. Never in the recent history of the nation have we witnessed such a violent political distemper, such a foul, no-hold barred campaign, such volcanic presidential eruptions on the hustings and such apocalyptic muckraking. Even by the dismal standards of Nigerian electoral process, this is quite a new low. To search for a passable comparison, we must reach back to the unedifying last days of the First and Second Republics. In the certificate controversy, the military have intervened in a way and manner that suggests a deep fracture in that surviving national institution. In raiding the offices of the opposition, the security services have also weighed in in such an unprofessional manner that suggests the thorough tarnishing of reputation reminiscent of the old NSO. The judiciary is probably waiting in the wing to deliver the coup de grace. These unusual palpitations suggest that Nigeria is on the cusp of momentous change. Such changes are usually presaged by titanic eruptions of passions and by radical and revolutionary convulsions that obliterate old fault lines of ethnicity, religion and region even as they substitute new ones. Old habits may die hard, but there is a fat lady already singing in the distance. We ought to remind ourselves that this national passion play is being enacted against a background of outlandish and unprecedented corruption, vile looting of the national treasury, political anomie, religious disorientation in which the nation has come under the spiritual hegemony of spiritually damaged people, and a virtual balkanization of the nation by an insurgency which eternally taunts and humiliates our once proud military machine. This is where comparison might be dangerous. It was certainly not this bad during the First Republic. Nzeogwu’s war cry was against ten-percenters. Now, we have ninety-percenters. But that was also a very different country. There has been a huge demographic shift in favour of young people. The old population of Nigeria has been purged and culled both by natural adversity and by the man-made calamity of evil governance. Change is being driven by explosion in human consciousness and technological innovations which have revolutionized communication and the radical interface of the global community. How did we then get into this sorry pass in which the aggregate consciousness of the political class seems to lag behind the aggregate consciousness of the national multitude in its seething resentment and sullen animosity waiting for a spark to explode in our collective face? In order to get out of the Byzantine maze of horror and the continuing wastage of our people on an industrial scale, we must go back to where the rains started beating us. To trace this lineage of political failure is to go back to the origins of the Fourth Republic and even farther beyond. The funeral of an elephant Posted by: Tatalo Alamu in Tatalo Alamu 8 days ago The sight of the PDP unraveling , coming apart at the seams with spectacular aplomb, must fill one with pity and terror. How did the largest party in Africa come to this sorry pass? Yet it is a well-known historical fact that hubris affects not only human beings but human institutions and political contraptions as well. This, surely, cannot be the same party destined to rule for the next sixty years, according to one of its summarily defenestrated chieftains. Conceived as a broad-based pan-Nigerian caucus to free the nation from military bondage, the PDP has become a fascist terror machine from which the entire nation is seeking liberation. Those who refuse to learn their history are condemned to repeat the lesson. We have been through this route before. In the Second Republic, the late Umaru Dikko, confusing the monstrous amalgam of placemen and party hacks that his party was to Hitler’s NAZI, boasted that the NPN would rule for a whole millennium, in short an African Third Reich. But shortly thereafter, a gunslide replaced the NPN’s dubious landslide, to put things in General Theophilus Danjuma’s memorable phraseology. To be sure, these two gentlemen were no idle prattlers. They had the fact to back up their controversial claims -or so it seemed. When Vincent Ogbuluafor was making his canonical declaration from the throne, the PDP stood supreme with the opposition in total disarray and reeling from the hammer blow of the rampart and rampaging party. At the time Umaru Dikko was boasting about the bearish strength and virtual invincibility of his party, Chief Awolowo’s UPN had just been handed one of the worst and most humbling electoral whipping of the century. __._,_.___
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 00:01:39 +0000
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