Time for statesmen

Let us not kid ourselves, our country is in danger. We live under a storm cloud, even if we carry on with the routine optimism of the unwary. This is not a time for the mere blossom of rhetoric or the grandstanding of a political virtuoso. It is time for home truths, and we seem to suffer parsimony in that regard.



What are at stake? The survival of Nigeria and the security of lives of our citizens. We seem to be living in denial. Both major political parties are at each other’s throats. The tribes do not trust each other and the religions see themselves are God’s and the other as the devil’s. The PDP is in power and it is accused of using the military and the impeachment weapon to cow the opposition. The PDP, in its recriminatory wisdom, is also accusing the opposition as the mastermind of Boko haram, and employing public relations firms to launder its ineptitude in the world. The opposition, the APC, fresh from what some have characterised as a contentious convention, has however had its national executive, and has accused the PDP of failure.



Yet three things haunt us today. One, the remorseless raids and rapine of Boko Haram; the deployment of soldiers as an arm of the ruling party; the fury and flurry of the impeachment saga, and the fear that the whole country is in the throes of an imperial presidency. All of this is happening amidst poverty, a collapsing infrastructure and absence of it, educational crisis and youth unemployment.



Everything is directed clearly at victory in 2015. But how are we sure that violence will not torpedo the trek to that date? How are we sure that we are not on the edge of a civil war? Politicians on both sides are not speaking to each other. Rather they are lobbing words at each other.  With Adamawa down, the agony lingers. With Nassarawa in the crosswind, the polity aches with fear. In Rivers State, Edo State, and even a hint in Oyo State, we have seen the primitive dust of distrust and mayhem. Meanwhile, we see a leadership at odds with an answer to the violent impunity of an insurgent militia, the latest victim being the convoy of Gen. Muhammadu Buhari.



We don’t have a history to fall back on in this instance. Our past never had the convoluted skein of today’s narrative. We have had religious angst in the past, but not this sanguinary. We cannot think of Maitatsine riots in the same bloody register as Boko Haram. Religion was always a factor in our politics, but there was no time we saw clerics line up publicly in defence of their faithful as candidate and spewed hate words about the other faith like we have today. People did not insist on a Muslim or Christian candidate. We had the Abiola-Kingibe ticket on this land once, and religious murmur purred into silence.



We have had impeachments in the past, not even the Balarabe Musa story carried the omen of a national catastrophe as we feel today. Obasanjo’s impeachments were projects of revenge and humiliation. But they did not threaten the fabric of the nation on the present scale.  The impeachments flattered Obasanjo’s pride and we spoke of a heated polity. We did not express fears about the fragile temper of the whole country in this apocalyptic mood.



So, this is the time to put away party differences and realize that whoever wins may resemble that of the Roman General Pyrrus who conquered and conquered and conquered and lamented, “ one more victory and we are finished.” That is the origin of the phrase, Pyrrhic victory.



But this is the time for statesmen. The tragedy is that I cannot see anyone in the country who can serve as an arbiter in this battle to the death between the parties. Maybe I have not searched well. I see no one. The closest is Wole Soyinka, but he has spoken himself hoarse over the malady that his melody is heard without its prosody. Soyinka is a critic as statesman. We want a soul who is a political figure. But they are either compromised into partisanship or bought with filthy lucre. “In our times,” wrote poet Alexander Pushkin, “man, whatever his element, was a murderer, a traitor or thief.” That is the pass today.



All institutions have been abused. The word is tainted, the money is adulterated, the pulpit bastardised, the gun does not protect but the criminal. Fear belongs to the strong and confidence to the harlot. Truth is only perceived because no one can pluck it like a fruit because it does not hang low. We have the council of state, but what we want is a council of statesmen. That council has not spoken truth to power because no one has risen to a moral stature that would lend him an unimpeachable voice.



In the past when the leaders erred we had men who spoke and they shook the moral moorings of the land. One of them was Chief Obasanjo. Because he did not rise up to the substance of his rhetoric when he became president, he has not retreated into the high cheer of a statesman. He is seen as a contributor to the crisis rather than a voice out of the void.



 Shehu Shagari is insistently quiet because he was never a moral force, either as president or ex-president. Ibrahim Babangida left office in murky ways and his doings show he belongs to one side of the divide. Buhari is an APC chieftain and the weight of his recent warning is lightened by his partisan cloud.



In other countries, we have seen men show moral gravitas in times of crisis. U.S. presidents perennially comment on crisis and their voices are taken seriously. This began with the grandeur of their first president George Washington, who thankfully would not turn the position into a regal one as life president. He had the opportunity. That made him a statesman and intervened in feuds after he left office, including when Jefferson was president.



Mandela played key father-figure role after he vacated office. His voice kept the system in calm waters. We want the sort of leader max Weber designated as the charismatic figure. Such are rare these days because technology and easy access to information take away the myth of leaders. That raises the stakes of leadership. Or are we victims of technology that subdues the greatness of men?



If we don’t have men on top, the other alternative is the mass. But the crowd has been compromised in today’s world. Crowds can be conjured by politicians for any cause these days. A scoundrel can buy a crowd and claim to be the people’s heroes. The crowd has lost its innocence. In his Crowds And Power, Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti shows how the crowd can emerge for just any purpose, for feast, for god, for the devil, for reversals. We cannot count on the crowd to save us because the Nigerian masses do not trust them anymore. Each crowd suffers from solitude in the logic of David Reisman who wrote a book titled, The Lonely Crowd.



If the crowd that should represent the masses cannot help us, and the charismatic leader is lost in the Nigerian sea, to whom shall we turn? That is the question that can stand between peace and disaster for Nigeria in the coming months. This is not an APC or PDP matter. It is a Nigerian matter, and the political class cannot be saved from blame if Nigeria lapses into collapse with division and bloodshed.

 - In Touch, The Nation newspaper, 28/07/2014