An Ode: Liberty, Democracy, and a classical slalom change in a Failed State mode – need to Redefining the Future -By Jimi Bickersteth

“In Chess as in life, foresights wins.” – Charles Buxton.

On this trip, the moment I saw the imposing, illuminated and glistering Liberty Enlightening the World (known as the Statute of Liberty) donated to the US by France in 1886 as an artistic personification of liberty, my mind’s eye raced back in quick succession to the African experience and in particular, the Nigerian situation vis-à-vis the fiddling and fraternity with the doctrine of liberty and democracy – doctrines that have become on their own a wholesome global phenomenon.

Liberty, lexically, the state of being free from excessive restrictions placed on one’s life by a governing power: restore democracy, justice and liberty is a common phrase. Broadly speaking, liberty is the ability to do as one pleases. It is a synonym for the word freedom. In modern politics, liberty is the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behaviour, political views and or aspirations. In philosophy, liberty involves free will as contrasted with determinism.

Sometime liberty is differentiated from freedom by using the word “freedom” primarily, if not exclusively, to mean the ability to do as one wills and what one has the power to do in a prosperous and peaceful state where ceteris paribus, all is equal; and using the word “liberty” to mean the absence of arbitrary restraints, taking into account the rights of all involved.

In this sense, the exercise of liberty is subject to capability and limited by the rights of others. Thus, liberty entails the responsible use of freedom under the rule of law without depriving anyone else of their freedom. The modern concept of political liberty has its origins in the Greek concepts of freedom and slavery, the original Greek concept of freedom.

It is closely linked with the concept of democracy, as Aristotle put it: “This, then, is one note of liberty which all democrats affirm to be the principle of their state… This is the second characteristic of democracy, whence has arisen the claims of men to be ruled by none, if possible, or, if this is impossible, to rule and be ruled in turns; (emphasis mine) and so it contributes to the freedom based upon equality.”

In the pursuit of the Social Contract theory and the search for an egalitarian society, (most influentially formulated by Hobbs, John Locke and Rousseau (though first suggested by Plato in The Republic) – was among the first to provide a political classification of rights, in particular, though the notion of sovereignty and of natural pursuit of happiness). In Nigeria’s case, and which holds largely true of the African continent, its bourgeoisie, generally, the ruling class have not delivered on:
a. the promise of Independence, nor,
b. exhibit in its democratic experiences the strong political will and sense to establish a society where the people’s liberty and freedom holds sway and,
c. its hard-worn liberation from racism has not been reinforced by liberation from poverty, disease and economic stagnation in spite of its stupendous embarrassment of riches, including land mass and the abundance of human resources.
It thus portrayed that the humanity of African’s has only been partially redeemed from colonialism but, into neocolonialism and depravity, and it’s even today a case of incomplete liberation in the commerce and economic sense.

There is no doubting that the need for liberation has been one of the greatest needs of humanity. Historically, men, women and whole nations have always been subjected to various forms of captivity: Strong men preyed on the weak; powerful nations took advantage of smaller nation’s that have no strong allies, and all emerged as a pork shop in the synagogue.

This was more so because liberation from colonialism and its concomitants cannot be complete because the avant-garde of the continent’s liberation movement and subsequently their scions, administration to administration, regime to regime worked with a truncated notion of liberation, of freedom and consequently, delivering very little impression of the dividends of democracy.

It is saddening that the nascent petty bourgeoisie that led the rest of society to ‘flag Independence,’ exhibited their fussy notion of independence and to them what total liberation meant, was that the “White man must go home”. Once he went home, his position and seat of authority as well as his white house on the hill became vacant. The ruling class figuratively, moved into both, and for this class the liberation struggle had come to an end.

Take for instance, the Nigerian nation-state structure of colonial society with some modifications such as:
i. the creation of states from 12 to 19 and 36 respectively, and,
ii.six geographical regions – apparently a flashback to the colonialists idea of regionalism, and a perfect admittance that the state structure, in spite of its Federal character ‘roulette’, was not adequately, addressing the issues of representation, equity and equality.

Meanwhile, the structure of the colonial political economy it inherited was half-heartedly tuned to shape in the heat of indignation (on the apartheid solidarity by the military administration), but, arguably, that indigenization decree of the late seventies and its external linkages which have been the sources of the nation’s development of under-development remained intact, and have been generating deeper under-development ever since.

Added to this is the lack of well-thought out strategies by its Leviathan and pompous government bureaucracy. The top heavy bureaucracy, albeit, taking considerable liberties for combating the forces of under-development unleashed on society by colonialism and neocolonialism is essentially responsible for the nation’s woeful failure to lift society from the morass of under-development and providing the basic frameworks for deploying in greater sense the dividend of democracy to its largely poor populace.

The problem of development in Nigeria, Africa or in any other Third World country, is rather complex, and in its complexities has its economic, political and social aspects. Although, it is generally assumed that its economic component is most crucial. However, it must be remembered that most economic decisions that influence development or under-development anywhere in the whole wide world are political.

With hindsight, the development strategy adopted by the Nigerian ruling class for instance, has been influenced by the totality of their perception of under-development as a social class. This perception, which is a direct outcrop of a narrow-minded class interest and class ideology, has failed to put under-development within its historical context and uncover the factors which have engendered dynamic under-development in our society.

Sitting under the cloudless Maiduguri sky, one thought that worried me and that I thought should worry the national leadership and their self-confidence was the nation’s health, politically, socially, and economically. A fact I know too well was that, in a growing child, mild bouts of neurosis were bound to occur, but in the nation’s case, at 62years, a certain organ in its body-politick and psyche had began to show more serious symptoms and the nation was dangerously close to schizophrenia, yet it continued to watch casually as the apocalypse approached.

It goes well without saying that the nation today is at the threshold of liberation through democracy. Democracy! In other word the New Testament of the twenty first century is a word like “love”, one must be enough of a connoisseur of words and their meanings to know that, like love, a woman like the people, were at their best when their expectations of love and service were understood, even, if not fulfilled. “Love”, like liberty, what do they mean? They mean all things to all men, even, when life is not always as it appears. And so, when people talk of “Love”, they mean obsession. Love, in the Valentine season, if it exists at all, is a form of madness. The same with liberty.

Liberty, democracy. All the world was today screaming these words, but for them too it is an obsession, a madness. Politicians have chosen to entrust the power to the political epileptics and ‘latter-day’ democrats, which the nation had really found perplexing. Hence, like a giant slalom canoe race along a winding course marked by poles, the nation was hiccuping and gasping for breath, while suffering from delusions of grandeur in its ‘catch-me-if-you-can’ democracy race – a tale of head you win, tail I lose. Meanwhile, the nation looked quite quiet, distraught, earnest and still worried. The silence speak the truth.

A late sage once said that “society’s history and development, though, often short of perfection contains in it the germ of its radical and revolutionary reformation on the Hegelian dialectic mode and cycle of Thesis – antithesis – synthesis – thesis and the events of nature and of history, and the ideals of freedom, liberty, justice, religion etc which man cherishes, are the progressive objectification of the idea.

In the communist manifesto and its three basic ideas, namely;

1. that economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch;
2. that consequently, ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land, all history has been a history of class, class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social evolution; and,
3. that, by its normal operations, capitalism had produced its own grave-diggers”. How true and timely these were to the nation’s predicament.

It could be deduced from the above that the nation’s democratic experiences deserves a necessary and thorough political analysis of the ensuing and inherent strengths and weaknesses of the politicians in the nation in the light of reason, if the nation would redeem its current ‘failed state status’.

Everything was hot in this pastoral landscape broiling under the naked sun. The people would have likened it to a baking valley of death. Insurgents stubborn as a camel in heat and attempting to bury the nation underneath a wave of violent humanity with so many cheated of their lives. At its opposing end was Kwatarkashi, Zamfara, where a man can tear a fortune from the earth with his bare hands witnessing a harvest of death, in the south, the nation was swimming in black gold. Despite the theatricality of this statement, for one moment, that was no longer an anachronism.

The struggles of either the insurgents, or the herdsmen, the Taraba/Jukun crises, the killings in Ọwọ, kaduna, et al, had became more like wild combat than love with a people with whom they had been together in full understanding and sympathy, making rather broad pantomimes.

The people in Borno, Zamfara, Taraba and elsewhere had protested in strong terms the insurgents barbaric wantonly profane assaults and self-immolation can never be the solution. Even, as it were, the notorious leaders seemed reluctant to make a noble sacrifice of themselves.

While it was very brave, daring and clever to find out how the insurgents and herdsmen nursing some unspoken sorrows were doing what the whole nation, nay the world knew they were doing, the world would have loved to see the security forces stopped them from doing it.

In a failed state mode the nation’s deadly nightshade wasn’t that different from huckleberries. Well, to the nation and its people it was a tough world economically, added to this, the effects of the insurgents on its peace and tranquility, I reflected, not very profoundly: not many of us leave it alive.

I surveyed the empty wastes that stretched as far as the eye could see and the sun was blazing down in its ferocity with the fury of the desert storm and its merciless rays. The flame and the noise of deaths like jets coming at the same time, for jets fly a little ahead of their noise; and it all suddenly became like being inside the sun.

The world was made of flame and heat, even the trees, shrubs and forests were burning as the tenacious napalm clung to the semi arid vegetation with the noise of the attacking jets accompanied by screams of horror mingled with shouts of baffled rage. It was like war.

One could see heads lay on the bare floor of the equatorial forest like shattered melon. Those left alive were to scatter into the jungle. For sure, the insurgents have been taking a beating in spite of the fact that the military forces intelligence gathering and efforts in this large and infinitely complicated nation was baffling and irritatingly so.

The costly intelligence efforts broken down into Fortran, the language of computers were frequently nullified by a seemingly violation of a people living unaware as a child that death was moving toward her on silent feet, on an old infantry Maxim in my Defence Academy days, I remembered so well – “dig in against a rush but change an ambush”.

At that time of night when all the bar men in Lagos, Portharcourt and Abuja were going mad trying to keep up with the demands of a populace freed from a hard day’s work. Men watching the twilight fall over the cities skylines uninterestedly. Some feigning excessive fatigue at their different assessments and opinions to the security forces questionable success or none at all in its attempt at quashing the insurgents uprising and the many deaths of our compatriots on its trail, and at the question of who’s getting heavy money, rations and munitions swift and direct to the insurgents, and sophisticated munitions to the herdsmen.

The insurgents, using the same old network, same old techniques, only with increased efficiency and doing better, which the security forces should have found comfortably easy to counter, decimate and nullified. With all this permutations going on in my mind at the Maiduguri airport, my glance turned idly away from the window of the lounge of the terminal building to the confused scene below where excited travellers, anxious relatives, bags and corsages were mixed in a typical Nigerian airport stew and salad drama.

The babble of voices showing the unspoken tension that precede a flight in hot weather. The crowd, the weather, hot like hell, and the anguish of the killings depressed me slightly, leaving me seething with fury. If I was in government, and only if, I’ll have turned the security outfits and apparatchiks upside down and shake them until heads rolled, as the passengers surged forward eagerly. I kept staring with trepidation and trembling into the anonymity of the great airfield.

I kept musing on the nation’s what was and what is. Observations on the nation’s men and affairs and relating them to the nation’s present conditions and predicament which to say the least was colourless, yet with a air of sophistication and bad grace. The cerebral notes came tumbling out across the writing pad on my laps and flowing through the ink of my pen inside the speck in the atmosphere that was the 737.

I felt that the nation’s leaders with their embarrassment of ill-gotten riches and the arrogance that went with it, and a nation uncommitted to anything but the good life, and so far untouched by sterner realities and the screams of hunger, disaffection, macabre, kidnappings and the excessive razzmatazz of violence and killings advertised in the land, must each own and read T.E.Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, one of the literary treasures of the 20th century – a story of a war-torn world that tests its understanding of politics, society, morality and violence to the limit.

The hour dragged by with the same combination of ninety-five percent boredom and five percent terror that makes a jet trip for most a nightmare and an equivalent of the same amount of time spent in combat. The first hint of the rising sun lightning the cabin and with it came to mind the skirmishes and carnages in Borno, Zamfara, Ondo and Kaduna States, that had the nation’s nerves calm; and more in a mood of resigned anticipation, rather than an anxiety.

I I

I glanced upwards, up above and beyond the rim of the horizon, the deep blue of the sky was turning pale, smudged with white clouds that were growing thicker as I watched as though looking at a film in slow motion, swelling out into great cauliflower formations whose edges caught the sun with brilliant colours.

The excitement, one felt, at the elections and its aftermath smothered all fear. One observed that apart from the occasional mound and undulations, the contestants in the elections have had to rely on instinct and luck – two elements in which all humans had an enduring faith. While the rumble, fake news, rumours, unsubstantiated claims that had characterized the nation’s politics had the nation throwing rolls and butter pats at each other, with millions watching the process with a peculiar detachment.

Even at that, one can’t help but recall the 2019 elections, I noticed groups of men and women packed full of static tension crowded round the soapbox like ants around scraps of meat, standing, waiting, shouting questions without answers. Then, the pale grey, Saturday morning, the nation woke up to the embrace of the sudden postponement of the elections with the flimsiest of excuse.

That morning the street were deserted, but in the street down to the railway station a couple of shops and bars were open, where some urchins were doing justice to sachet of ‘Pelebe’ and others were bracing themselves with the first drink of the day. The newspaper kiosk was opposite the station. The lead papers were folded out on top and one of them had a late breaking news of the elections postponement.

An election whose sincerity and integrity abinitio had carried a measure of doubt, with no suggestion or evidence of motive, subterfuge and sabotage, the electoral umpire, INEC, stood morally wounded. Even, as the enpassant, subliminal message rescheduling the elections by a mere one week.

The fear that safety considerations of the elections materials, logistics, planning and all, were being subordinated to dereliction, tardiness and productivity inefficiencies, the real cankerworm in the nation’s body politick that has got to change.

There suddenly was a holiday atmosphere with contradictory emotions and a sullen smell of an approaching storm. With this backdrop, a slightly, stupid euphemism, what with the gross dereliction, a basis well laid for discrediting whatever the outcome of the elections would be, particularly, with the rumour mill agog of certain foreign interests, who appeared less than friendly, and the Venezuela scenario flashed through my mind. I shuddered.

How prepared is the nation for the 2023 version. Politics, elections and all like civilization and moustache – it takes a long time to grow but can be destroyed within minutes. One’s inbred, sense of what was right, fit and proper excluded all possibility of complicity. But, this umpire INEC should resist to be seen as an obscene life-size plastic model, naked and bald. Even if by its unpreparedness, it reminds one of a porpoise, benign and playful, ready at any moment to splash into the pool of its own connivance.

The decision to carry out a successful, free, fair and credible elections hanged on INEC’s neck, under a head resting like an invalid’s in a nest of cushions. From a weary experience, to try and dissuade it in any form, manner and or shape would be self-defeating and a moral peccadilloes which would be of global concerns, the politics of the situation, and would not judge by intentions, but by results.

As a people, the nation oversimplifies everything and often do have the politics of the situation rationalised. How do you explain the inability to conduct an election a whole four years after the last one. Can the nation host a world meet in its present state!

The nation feed and live on inefficiency, as some people do on vitamins. Spaghetti logistics, indeed! A fait accompli! The politics of the nation’s elections and INEC’s were intricately woven around ineptitude, bureaucratic platitudes, the babbling of some fawning and funny acolytes on all sides, but the truth.

PMB, on the surface there was the same familiar panache, the bravado, but underneath something had changed, moist yielding eyes looked amused with the harshness of authority taught only by experience in the high office, saw the ineptitude that had over the years advertised the nation destined to become one of the greatest powers in the world, civilized power in agriculture, industry, military, ambitions that have now become almost commonplace.

The ineptitude – a subtle insult to the nation’s collective integrity, resourcefulness and character; incidents such as this should raise the nation’s anger and hatred and forge ahead in a spirit of resolve. This thought filled one with febrile excitement. One is forced to bow to the winds of history.

The cracks – carefully constructed facade widening even as the politicians, composed and indifferent, they know they were holding things together by a thread. It may get worse before it was over. Much worse with the nation’s politicians withering glare.

As the world gets into the mode of a recovery from a global recession occasioned by its Covid-19 experiences and expectedly the prices of the nation’s primary commodity exports risen very little above their pre-covid level, there can be no doubt of the need for action based on internal unity and cooperation; even as it struggles to continue to earn a living in a very hostile international economic climate that would show no let but hindrance, it should be perhaps be talking redefining with resilience as the recovery key in place of restructuring.

The private villas with their gardens and swimming-pools, squalid modern buildings. The traffic did not built up. Suddenly it was night: a wide deep blue-black nothing.

#JimiBickersteth

Jimi Bickersteth is a blogger and writer.

He can be reached on Twitter @bickerstethjimi

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