I shall not insist that the historic/biblical figure of Nebuchadnezzar
is uniquely apt for the pivotal figure of the ‘democratic’ history in
the making at this moment — for one thing, Nebu was a nation builder and
a warrior.
One could argue, even more convincingly for the figure of Balthazar, his
successor, or indeed, Emperor Nero as reference point — you all
remember him — the emperor who took to fiddling while Rome was burning.
However, you should easily recall why I opted for King Nebu — the figure
that currently sits on the top of our political pile himself evoked it,
albeit in a context that virtuously disclaimed any similarities, even
tendencies. Perhaps, he meant it at the time when he claimed: ‘I am no
Nebuchadnezzar’. Perhaps, not!
One judges leaders on acts however, not pronouncements, which are often
as reliable as electoral promises. King Nebu remains relevant — and not
only for leadership. We, the citizens, are beginning to feel the heat...
Without any claims to prophecy — unlike Shadrach and company, we wake up
each morning to a sensation that we have been cast in the furnace
together with those who at least committed the crime of dissent or
criticism. No divine miracle appears to be at hand for a last-minute
rescue.
In desperation, one is reduced to hoping that the evocation of his own
biblical reference point will resonate somewhere in the mind of one who
is so ostentatiously humble and pious, kneels at the feet of a priest
who could easily be mistaken for an office worker, and cultivates the
high and holy company of acknowledged spokesmen of God.
So, here goes. Gentlemen of the Press, let’s not beat around the bush:
the line has been drawn. The people must decide — whether to submit or
resist. We may be no-count plebians in the sight of the new-born
patricians of Aso Rock and their apologists but — must we revert to the
Abacharian status of glorified slaves? Of course, it is up to any people
to decide.
The praetorian guards have been let loose — to teach the rabble their
place. The recent choice of a new leader for the Guard was clearly no
accident, and this hitherto unknown enforcer, one Suleiman Abba, has
wasted no time in inaugurating a season of brutish power.
When a people’s elected emissaries are disenfranchised, cast out like
vagrants and resort to scaling fences to engage in their designated
functions, the people get the message. However, the choice is always
there, and each choice comes at a cost. It is either we pay now, or pay
later.
The latest action of the supposed guardians of the law against the
nation’s lawgivers is an unambiguous declaration of war against the
people. I am glad that a commentator has referred to it as an attempted
coup-de-tat. And it nearly worked.
Legislators are not elected for their athletic prowess, and such
endeavours should not be demanded of them. There are even presidents and
prime ministers who were elected despite physical handicaps. The brain
is where it matters, the vision and commitment to service. Our
legislators however have been made to perform over and beyond the call
of the Olympics.
I don’t understand why some media have described their action as a show
of shame — this is a very careless, easily misapplied designation. The
act of scaling gates and walls to fulfill their duty by the people must
be set down as their finest hour. They must be applauded, not derided.
If shame belongs anywhere, it belongs to the Inspector-General of Police
and his slavish adherence to conspiratorial, illegal, and
unconstitutional instructions — to undermine a democratic structure, and
one — to make matters worse — convoked in response to an emergency of
dire public concern.
What sticks to this policeman is worse than shame; it is infamy. Such a
public servant deserves to be publicly pilloried, tried and meted a
punishment that is appropriate to treasonable acts, if only to serve as a
deterrent to others in positions of responsibility under the law. To
demand less is to reduce ourselves below the status free citizens of a
free nation.
It means we endorse violence against our representatives, that we are
content to submit ourselves to the jackboots of naked force. It is to
annunciate the era of the brute, as the current fundamental modality of
governance.
For this latest outrage, one in an escalating series of impunity, the
buck stops yet again at the presidency, and that incumbent, Goodluck
Ebele Jonathan, continues to surprise us in ways that very few could
have conjectured.
Peaking at his own personalised example where he set the law of simple
arithmetic on its head — I refer to the split in the Governors’ Forum,
and his ‘formal’ recognition of the minority will in a straightforward,
peer election — democracy has been rendered meaningless where it should
be most fervently exemplified.
Nothing is more unworthy of leadership than to degrade a system by which
one attains fulfillment, and this is what the nation has witnessed time
and time again in various parts of the nation, the recent affront
against the legislative chamber being only the most blatant and
unconscionable.
We know, of course, that this is not the first of its kind in the
nation’s history, but precedents are not binding. Each leader selects
his or her own model for emulation or avoidance, and that choice is
certain indication of the true nature of such a leader, and a clue to
the kind of conduct that a people can expect of him.
It is a warning. His choices for the occupancy of crucial public
positions — such as the protective arm of the nation — constitutes an
even more immediate and constant public alert. The signals are ominous —
for and beyond 2015.
These, to state the obvious, are not ordinary times. The menace of Boko
Haram hangs over the corporate entity called a nation and over every
individual, citizen or mere bird of passage.
The cliché ‘heating up the polity’ may grate the eardrums with its
banality but I think that we have a right to demand of a leader not to
stoke up the furnace in which events have cast its citizens.
Every day records a new violation of our humanity. The atrocious
targeting of the great mosque of Kano has rendered any lingering doubt
of impending national imposition an invitation for collective suicide,
preferably through piecemeal dismemberment.
The theories of cause and effect can wait, or continue — it does not
matter — the omniscient in such matters continue to pontificate, some of
them blithely forgetting that they indeed contributed to policies that
landed us in this brutal cleft.
What does matter is an awareness that the nation is only part of a
global eruption of fundamentalist delusions whose staple diet consists
of destabilisation and dehumanisation — all summed up as an ideology of
Hate for the different. For the defiant.
This should form the basis of understanding by which an implacable enemy
is confronted. And it should form the basis of leadership awareness. It
should have led, by now, to national mobilisation on an unprecedented
scale, one that may even impinge, however temporarily, on those
liberties that you and I consider non-negotiable in our rights as
citizens.
However, imagine, just imagine that today’s leadership were of such a
cast of mind, one that makes demands of sacrifice from the citizens. The
response would be outright rejection. And deservedly so, because any
such motion would be distrusted. It would be seen as an act of
insincerity, an opportunity to acquire even more powers for citizen
enslavement.
This is the price you pay for encroaching on the precincts and
entitlements of others with whom you share a structure of authority. You
lose the trust of the other legs of — in this case — a governance
tripod.
Every act, especially in abnormal circumstances, would be viewed with
extreme suspicion, and the gates open wide, without any strenuous effort
on its part, to the triumphal progression of the enemy. That is the
collateral damage that the abuse of power attracts to whatever should be
a collaborative undertaking.
Where governance has degenerated to such a level that any individual, on
account of his uniform, can stop an elected representative of a people,
in this case a governor, from going about his legitimate duties or
exercising his basic, elementary right as a citizen — as happened during
the recent Ekiti elections — we do not need to guess what happens in a
situation that calls for general mobilisation, on which, needless to
say, the good will and trust of all arms of governance depend in a
crisis. This, of course, requires the capacity for forward-thinking.
The shambles that punctuated a presidential campaign visit at the
Obafemi Awolowo University a few days ago merely underline the total
alienation of President Jonathan from the reality that has engulfed the
nation.
Yes, political campaigns are part and parcel of the bloodline of the
democratic process. We know that they never stop. However, that a
national leader should go campaigning on the platform of ethnic support
at a time when priorities dictate a united national engagement for
survival, is a grotesque undertaking that was tragically rebuked in the
massacre of worshippers and desecration of the Kano mosques, almost
simultaneously with the alienated gathering of selected crowned heads
and journeymen at the OAU campus, a macabre echo of Balthazar’s feast.
Long before Nyanya, long before Chibok, long before the mildest of the
now innumerable violations of our basic right to exist as free citizens,
the march of a nation towards implosion has dominated the landscape,
but an obsession with the pettiness of power has obscured remedial
vision and thus, the creative options constantly open to any prescient
leadership.
If Somalia was too far away as instruction, then surely Mali remains
sufficiently close warning. With the invasion of Mali by al Qaeda and
its clones and surrogates, we moved from mere portents, from mere
distant rumblings, to the wake-up knock right against our gates — and
yet leadership slumber remained unbroken.
Mali was retrieved, a breathing space created, but it would appear that
this was when complacency took over and snoring attained its highest
pitch. The few waking moments have been spent on sterile, tawdry
intrigues and consolidation on the marshes and quicksands of power. That
failure in the aggressive destabilisation of the enemy is the cross
that the nation bears today — but we must concede that this gross
dereliction applies not only to Nigeria but to her neighbours — indeed
to ECOWAS — and the collective failure for concerted action.
Leadership counts however, and it was Nigeria that took the lead in that
critical and timely mission that was spearheaded by France.
The lesson of Mali was completely lost on complacent leadership however,
leaving time and space for alien invaders to make common cause with the
internal, unleashing destruction at will and dancing around a nation
whose armed forces have acquitted themselves creditably on foreign
missions.
The architect of that initial policy of containment was the recently
deceased Gbenga Ashiru, then Foreign Minister, unceremoniously removed
for the ends of premature politicking, before the logical development of
that initiative.
Now, of course, the very manipulators of Ashiru’s removal are falling
over one another to heap praises on the quality of his achievements in
office, skirting — who can blame them! — the tawdry reasons for his
removal from office. Petty, retaliatory calculations that placed the
interests of the nation, the very security of its people in acute
jeopardy from unfinished business. Ashiru’s presence in that position
had become a fly in the palm wine of Balthasar’s Feast.
Caution: no one dares predict that the plight of Nigerians would be any
rosier had his ideas been pursued till the very end. The point is simply
this — a process was interrupted, truncated without thought, petty
politicking being made to override substance. I wrote Ashiru to
commiserate with him and to bolster his morale. He replied in only two
words: USE AND DUMP!
Defend yourselves! This is what the perceptive have preached and groups
like the so-called Junior Task Force translated into action, the real
heroes of the defence of the tattered ‘Nigerian sovereignty’.
Among them, a hitherto unknown, a woman, has become one of the symbols
of resistance, an ordinary woman turned extraordinary, one of the
hunters who routed the diabolical hordes who appear to rout our military
even before their appearance.
Does it sound today as whimsical as it may have sounded to some when I
urged the organisation of willing survivors of Boko Haram into local
defence corps, their women especially, proposed that they be kitted out
fully, and formally inducted as auxiliaries.
Ladi, it would appear, needed no such urging from any direction. It was
obvious to her, and others like her that it was futile to await
salvation from a centre that is so self-obsessed with power that it no
longer sees even the danger to its very existence.
A people must defend itself. These are no ordinary times, and we have
moved beyond orthodox solutions. “Where two or three are gathered
together…” — I shall complete those words my own way: “They must
anticipate, organise, obtaining or improvising the wherewithal as
circumstances dictate. Fascism is the eternal enemy of freedom, and it
comes both in internal and external forms.”
Today, it would be premature to claim that Suleiman Abba and the many
incarnations of Shekau are cut from the same mould but remember, we have
been here before. Who can forget Sunday Adewusi, the original Robo-Cop!
And so, consider this; the ripples from the fascistic eruption of a
Suleiman Abba may actually result in far greater casualties and inhuman
degradation of society than those so far recorded even at the hands of
Shekau and his cohorts. That is the real and present danger.
This is why the call for vigilance is real and urgent, and a need to
clip the wings of a predatory bird before it devours society, becomes
paramount.
Beset by external and internal threats to liberty and dignity, abandoned
internally by a do-it-yourself government on the one hand, and
externally by (claimed) impediments from cynical allies — as we are made
to believe in the media — let no one cry Anarchy when the people
respond to that historic cry of liberation, to which one leader after
another — the most recent being the Emir of Kano and the Ulama leader,
Yahaha Jingir — have felt moved to urge upon their people: “Citizens,
Defend yourselves!”
• Being a press conference addressed by Professor Soyinka at the Freedom Park, Broad Street, Lagos, yesterday.
- by Wole Soyinka