Nigeria’s Nattering Nabobs Of Negativism According To Tinubu’s Bulldogs -By Chibuike Obi

Spiro Agnew was the vice president from 1969 to 1973  to Richard Nixon, the US president from 1969 to 1974. Agnew spoke these words, “In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own (sic) 4-H Club — the ‘hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” in a 1970 speech condemning vociferous critics of the disastrous regime he and his president were running.

The White House speech writer William Safire wrote the speech for the vice president with the catchily alliterative phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism” entering the political lexicon to signify anyone deemed as excessively sceptical of people’s motives or actions.

Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew oversaw a calamitous administration that included the intensification of the US-Vietnam war and the extension of the war into Laos and Cambodia that killed, maimed and dispossessed untold millions of people. They both had reputations for sordid political and financial corruption, unlike most US presidents whose corruption tends to be more sophisticated and normalized as a standard way of doing politics in the US.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, to name just two, are the most adept practitioners of the art of displaying an impressive facade of financial probity even though both received enormous campaign contributions from top Wall Street and other big business firms whose bidding and interests they faithfully served during their tenures at the expense of the larger population. They were duly rewarded after their tenures with speaking gigs and other deals that made them stupendously rich.

So for Nixon and Agnew, no matter how obvious or even brazen their corruption, or how criminal and disastrous their domestic and foreign policies, any opposition, especially from the media and the intellectual class, of whom Agnew had an intense and personal hatred, was always attributed to bad faith, disingenuousness or being held to unrealistically high standards.

Ultimately, it was their relatively minor domestic political crimes that destroyed their political careers. Spiro Agnew resigned on October 10th 1973 and became the second US vice president to resign in the history of the US while Richard Nixon resigned on August 9th 1974 and made history as the only US president to do so.

Since the establishment of the US as a republic and especially after it emerged as a global hegemon in the 20th century, US presidents from George Washington to Joseph Biden, the current US president, have been guilty of the most appalling crimes against humanity including the genocide of Native Americans, the slave trade and racism towards African-Americans, the funding and backing of despotic and murderous regimes in South America, South Asia and the Middle-East, are never brought to justice. (Joseph Biden is currently aiding and arming Israel in its ongoing genocide against the Palestinians).

Spiro Agnew resigned for taking bribes during his term as governor of Maryland, while Nixon resigned because of the Watergate crisis. However, both men did not get any jail time for crimes that, if committed by poor or black people, would have earned them long jail sentences in the US.

T.H. Huxley was a British biologist, anthropologist and educator who lived from 1825 to 1895. He was an accomplished anatomist but is known to the general public today for his spirited defence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which earned him the nickname Darwin’s Bulldog.

Charles Darwin and Albert Wallace independently put forward the theory of evolution by natural selection as an explanation of the origin of life and the diversity and distribution of plant and animal life forms on the planet. The theory was profoundly upsetting to the religious establishment that correctly understood that the theory falsified their biblical accounts of the origin of man, and they launched a furious and bitter attack against it. Huxley, Darwin, Wallace and many other men of science, fought back vigorously in debates, speeches, lectures, essays, articles and books. The fight was long and bitter; eventually, the steadily accumulating evidence supporting the theory won the day for the evolutionists. But Huxley, in particular, gained acclaim for the effectiveness of his polemics in defence of evolution. His vigour and defiance in defence of the more reserved Charles Darwin earned him the nickname “Darwin’s Bulldog”.

The bulldog appellation could be applied to Tinubu’s and before Tinubu to Buhari’s defenders.

The theory of evolution was proven right, and the only people contesting his theory today, the creationists and the Intelligence Design movement, are like Buhari and Tinubu’s defenders, wilfully dense and congenitally incapable of perceiving reality.

Huxley and other defenders of Evolutionary theory skillfully employed wit, eloquence and, most importantly evidence in their arguments. But Buhari and Tinubu’s defenders, henceforth to be called BAT, (incidentally, BAT is also formed from Tinubu’s initials), are shrill, raucous, flagrantly obtuse, and the only skill they employ is indiscriminate slander and envenomed invective. The courage of the bulldog was attributed to Huxley in his defence of evolution against the Christian establishment. (Despite the drastic whittling down of their powers in the 19th century {they could no longer burn heretics at the stake}, they could nevertheless make life unpleasant for freethinkers. Huxley coined the term agnostic). BAT’s defenders only resemble the bulldog in their impartiality for savage and malicious attacks against BAT’s critics no matter how well-evidenced the criticisms.

Darwin’s theory of evolution brought incalculable benefits to humanity, and so his defenders performed an inestimable service to humanity. But Buhari and Tinubu have been unmitigated disasters to the Nigerians they purportedly swore to serve, so then it follows their defenders rank beneath putrefying filth for defending leaders who had brought nothing but death, misery, disease, and suffering to their people.

A particularly loathsome manifestation of the BAT defender is the Igbo BAT defender. Despite BAT’s extensively documented abhorrence of Ndi-Igbo, the BAT defender dwells in an alternate universe where BAT likes and wishes the Igbo people well and it’s the Igbos who are willful and petulant in not appreciating BAT’s goodwill towards them. In short, as far as BAT’s defenders are concerned, the Igbos are nattering nabobs of negativism!

It may been noticed by many Igbo people on the various social media platforms, especially on WhatsApp, that there is invariably a BAT defender that haunts any given WhatsApp group. It may be an Ummunna (extended family), secondary school or university alumni WhatsApp forum; they are there spouting their ignorance leavened with spite and malice, and it is to be wondered at the patience of those in the group who spend time there disputing with them.  For it is evident that there is a serious pathology at work in these people. Even if it is conceded that a significant number of them are politicians or would-be politicians hoping or aspiring to that coveted and lucrative post of Igbo saboteur or agent provocateur, they cannot all be so far removed from reality to understand that there isn’t enough space for all the numbers of aspiring Okorochas, Wikes, Okowas, Iwuanynwus, Soludos, Arthur Ezes, Ned Nwokos etc jostling to feed from the crumbs of the tables and lick the boots of the Northern Oligarchs. So it may be speculated that a species of mindless contrariety or some form of Stockholm syndrome is the problem with them. But since the way they think already predisposes one to think that they live in an alternate universe, it may after all be that they genuinely think there may be enough space for them under the table and enough boot leather for them to lick.

Many Igbos and many well-meaning and despairing Nigerians indeed are also suffering a form of delusion or desperate wishful thinking in the mass participation in the Obidient movement but it is not very different from the Buharimania of 2014 and 2015. Nigerians are usually so desperate for the slightest whiff of decency or integrity in anyone who presents himself (most serious contenders for Nigerian president have been men) for leadership that any mountebank can usually deceive them into believing him till he gets into office and the scales fall from their eyes.

Murtala Mohammed, a hagiographic figure after his assassination, died too early before the impact of the havoc he created with his civil service reforms could be felt. Not to speak of never being brought to justice for his Asaba massacre and rank incompetence and savagery during the civil war.

Ibrahim Babangida overthrew Buhari in 1985 to general relief and rejoicing throughout the country ( a fact that many people forgot in the Buharimania of 2014 and 2015). He then pretended to rule as a benevolent and enlightened despot, which deceived many supposed progressive intellectuals like Wole Soyinka and the late Tai Solarin into even serving him till he showed his true colours.

MKO Abiola, of ITT infamy, arch-capitalist and close friend of military dictators, managed to fool most of the country who voted him president in one of Nigeria’s fairest elections that he had their interests at heart. He eventually paid the price of those who persistently fail to understand Nigeria’s intrinsic unworkability and the hegemony of the Northern Oligarchy. His closest parallel today is Peter Obi.

Olusegun Obasanjo pretended to be a reformed Democrat after winning a heavily rigged election on his behalf by the military in 1999.  Obasanjo was and is a sociopath whose antecedents were blindingly clear at the time, but Northern power brokers or equivalently Northern Oligarchs funded a successful propaganda effort to convince many Nigerians that Obasanjo’s time in Abacha’s prisons had healed him.

One note-worthy illustration of the barrenness and mediocrity of Nigeria’s intellectual landscape was the spectacle of faux-intellectuals like the unspeakably abominable British Empire apologist Bala Usman asserting that Obasanjo was sincerely fighting corruption when he said corruption was fighting back at Obsanjo’s laughably transparent sham corruption reforms.

Buhari, the pretend austere disciplinarian, whom many people, among them Sowore, should have known better than to even think about, let alone vote as a president, managed to be elected president after one of the most successful propaganda exercises in the history of Nigerian elections.

Peter Obi is more like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton in his brand of manipulation and deceit. They do not embezzle public funds and are strict accountants of public money in their care. But they game or work the political-legal-economic system in myriad ways to amass vast fortunes for themselves with the larger populace consequently increasingly immiserated.

So Peter in his tenure as Anambra State governor does not touch public funds but invests in businesses he or his family owns; and repairs roads however mostly inferior in quality to that of his president Ngige as testified to by many Anambrians including one prominent social media tweeter and Obidient, @onyenkuzi, who commented negatively about roads Peter Obi built before the onset of the Obidient movement; donates equipment to schools and builds a state hospital which governors like Chimaroke Nnamami had done in Neighbouring Enugu despite Nnamani looting colossal amounts of state funds; does not encourage the kind of heavy industrialization that is requisite for any state to develop e.g China and the East Asian Tigers, instead focuses on SMEs which had at best a mixed legacy; does not engage in the kind of electrification projects that the current Abia State governor who rode to power on the strength of the Obedient movement, is reportedly implementing, even though the technology and the knowledge were available then. Perhaps if Peter Obi had done that, there wouldn’t have been so much money left behind with which to preen as the savings and investment governor.

He leaves office with a lot of money in reserves (the first of its kind in Nigeria, though negating every principle of deficit spending that any interventionist state engages in to bolster economic activity but typical of the mindset which thinks building an inclusive economy is like running a limited liability company), but hurriedly awards contracts when almost out of the door for no apparent reason.

He leaves office having won many awards as a high-achieving governor and with a reputation for financial probity and frugality. However, the story begins to unravel from here. He joined the ruling party, the PDP, which then and now has a justified reputation for unbridled kleptomania. He was appointed chairman of the Nigerian Security And Exchange Commission by the disastrous Goodluck Jonathan administration.

To further bolster his impeccable anti-corruption reputation, he decided to be the vice presidential candidate to Atiku Abubakar, one of the most notorious thieves to ever hold public office in Nigeria, a signal accomplishment on Atiku’s part given the competition. In the 2023 election cycle, there were leaks that Atiku Abubakar had set up Special Purpose Vehicles SVPs to loot funds. It beggars belief to think Peter Obi wouldn’t have known about it since he is quite adept at opaque financial transactions. The Pandora papers revealed in 2021 that he had been using tax havens. People have tried to defend him by saying he didn’t hold political office at the time but that’s missing the point. Tax havens are one way the ultra-rich or the neo-liberal capitalists game the system for themselves. It ensures a highly regressive tax system that upwardly distributes wealth to the very rich and starves funds needed for the building and maintenance of infrastructures. It is why the Panama and Pandora papers named not just politicians, but businessmen and celebrities.

It can only be hoped that Nigeria would have gone to its natural destination as a non-existent country with its ethnic-national components forming more viable national-state units. This should happen before Nigeria’s constituent ethnic nations experience the disappointment of a Peter Obi presidency the way Americans especially African-Americans experienced the disappointments of the Obama and Clinton presidency. In any case, Nigerians have experienced too many disappointments from too many would-be messiahs. Realistically though, a Peter Obi presidency is extremely unlikely because no matter how much he kowtows to Babangida and the rest of the Northern Oligarchy, he would all in all likelihood receive the MKO Abiola treatment whenever he tries for president again and has an even higher chance than in 2023 of succeeding.

The other delusion afflicting many Igbos is the misplaced hope in Nnamdi Nkanu as a serious Igbo liberation leader. It is incontrovertible that Nigeria is an unworkable entity and almost certainly needs to break up for its many constituent nations to realise their potential. But it is to be wondered whether Kanu or Uwazurike have ever picked up a history book. The same problems which plagued the Biafran leadership during the civil war bedevil the independence movements today. Personality cults, unclear command structure, and lack of rigorous and realistic appraisals of regional, national and international geo-political and economic realities that ultimately led to the fall of the Biafran republic seem to be rife within the so-called Biafran liberation movements today.

It then seems clear that the crop of committed, serious and responsible intellectuals and leaders like Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Thomas Sankara, and Patrice Lumumba, who were the leading lights of African revolution and emancipation -extinguished by the counter-revolutionary imperialistic capitalist centres, the US, UK, France -are yet to be planted and harvested in Africa today. And until it is done, Nigerians and Africans will continue to suffer neuroses and psychoses of the kind which render them prone to manipulation and exploitation by greedy, tyrannical and con-artist leaders.

Chibuike Obi, a freelance journalist based in Niger State, can be reached at ojionu@hotmail.com or on Twitter @chibuikeobi19 or Facebook.