The Violence, Policing, Electoral Act, Tyrannies of power, conspiracy of silence and indifferent carelessness in a bleeding nation – the 9th assembly in the eye of the storm -By Jimi Bickersteth

A Micra rushed me from the Zamfara state airport to the Hotel at kwatarkashi, a 40some Kilometres distance. The driver looked as if he should still be in school: while ferreting along at about a hundred kilometre an hour with the mini, he continually leaned out of the car window to curse other drivers. There was a lax about law enforcement around here.

Besides, with the ongoing harassment, intimidation and serial killings all over the place, government at all levels have become like a tiny fountain that made a soft sound which encouraged a coolness that didn’t exist. With smudges under everyone eyes, all of us looking older than our real age, more worn, more shop-soiled. All wondering what we were going to do. All terrified with the cocktail of acids thrown at us, but only our pride and arrogance were sufficiently holding our terror in check.

The people are beginning to say that the state have played around with their emotion long enough. Now it should ex-‘plain’. For how long shall the nation endure this black, ghastly frustration. Can’t the State with all the hypes around its power and authority effectively call the terrorist’s bluffs once and for all.

The mauraders In their present state of mind, are dangerous, calculative but are not really tacticians in the strict sense of the word, but they looked like grand strategists, prowling from the Northeast to the Northwest almost effortlessly, like hot knife cutting through Anchor butter; and as poised, might do anything unless government provided an outlet for their pent-up, violent repression and serial senseless killings that had a dream quality about it, but, nonetheless, savagery in execution.

Light rain began to fall, as if to wash the bloods off the street, and island’s of sullen grey clouds knitted together to form depressing curtain of mist that blotted out the watery moon. One was hollow but not disinterested. The air had gone dead. There was no movement in the trees and on the streets; no wind, only a hot stillness that oppressed on a Nigerian state capital on a PHCN-less night.

In the distance, thunder rumbled. A line of black clouds began to edge above the horizon. A spear-thrust of blue-white lightning split the sky. A drop of water fell on the Micra’s windscreen. As he dropped me off at the hotel’s entrance, it began to rain. Rain beat in through the open window, and the curtains ballooned into the room as waves of hot air disturbed them. Thunder crackled.

Time it is to put the ugly malaise confronting the nation-state into right perspective. There must be a way out of all these ghastly nightmares; and in particular, this spinning web of terrorism that was inexorably creeping round the nation and its people. The government, legislative and executive, kept floundering in a pit of doubt, blotting out the vision of change, next level and the hopes it engendered all of which were craftily constructed in the ruling party manifestoes in sequins.

But, what the nation have confronting it today was realities of violence, kidnapping, maiming all of which looked odd and somehow sinister; primitive killings and fantasies of psychedelic modernity and development. With the pathetic growth in real terms and loans from left, right and centre, was it possible that all this dreams of a fantastically African fastest growing economy had happened in the political leaders and the media’s deranged imagination?!

Then, in the hush of the lonely room, above the drone of the dragonflies and the rustle of hollyhocks against the window, the voices of my inner mind, then I knew the verdict was that of a nation that had made neither here nor there a permanent destination. Thank goodness the nation was not making any serious fuss about its grief. If things remain as they are, the tragic picture of Year 2030 when the OBJ and the current loans are due for payment with the present slow pace of agriculture and industrial and human development came to my mind.

The vast police organization, trained and equipped to track down murderers had been caught flatfooted in a cleft stick and have been traumatized and left pedestrian in its approach to modern policing and security of a modern civil society. I have read so often about police methods, and knew that was how they are set to work, fugitives and felons seldom escaped. It was that efficiency and the vast man-hunting machine that frightened criminals. But today, the nation’s police have been so dehumanised and consequently, demystified. It is one sorry tale of police being killed, roasted after another.

Murder continues to prey on everyone’s mind. The people now thought in terms if violence. The pictures of the bruised faces after the third degree, the bloodstained, bullet-riddled bodies, the barbecued, grilled and charred remains of compatriots, the arson, the cult wars, which before had thrilled, now made one feel sick.

The nation-state had been purged of violence. The people have seen men die violently, fathers slaughtered in the presence of their families, ritualists caught by law enforcement agents with human heads and other human body parts, and now had no further interest in murder. It’s everywhere anyway, in the Cathedrals, Mosques, in the streets, on the Express, at homes and hotels, and everywhere – that has drained the peoples vitality. It was a recurring decimal of a dream. A dream of terrible intensity and one that made tremendous impact on the nation’s wellbeing.

The 9th NASS has expanded and absorb all its available space but yet to face the peoples problem – Justice. Either to set right an injustice or to avenge evil by bringing it to justice. One or two or three rather peculiar indications, the VAT politics, the politics of direct and or indirect primaries, the politics about the electronic transmission of the elections results, the position of the minorities and rotational presidency, but indications are not facts, you’ll say.

I make it a point of being always ready to disbelieve as well as believe anything that is told to me. But as for politicians in the legislative arm, they are always unsure of themselves and often carries with them credentials about and tries to give the air of a man of some eminence in their own rights and eyes, – a bounding conceit! One pity the political characters that emerged at the nation’s hemisphere as complicated individuals with comedy and tragedy standing side by side.

2021, a grim tense scene is followed by a lively amusing one. A good lyric in the music of the song. And so the ale and cakes and its momentarily lost and found rhythm continues. The air was a cold reminder of reality, but the sun was rising and the sky was beautifully clear, as harbingers preceding still the fates, until our countrymen realise that the air was invulnerable and the countryman’s vain blows of standing up to diss the presidency by veto malicious mockery.

The leadership of the NASS, an apparent docile appendage of the executive appeared to have marched through a political career so accomplished and with a smile that was at once engagingly shy and quietly intense. I liked people who tried to swim against the tide. Moral courage was more rare a commodity than the physical kind, a fact as true to the political avocation as any other profession.

At the cold and dark interior despite the extreme lightnings, the Red chamber as with the Green chamber, business was being conducted. All kinds of business. Everyone there knew it. Everyone there was part of it. Everyone there needed it. And yet everyone there was in one way or another dedicated to stopping it. I smiled in spite of myself.

For every person there in the hallowed chambers, the dualism was a normal part of life. The politicians in their better-than-average clothing and erect posture, the ready robotic smiles. They were the masters, knew it, and their demeanour proclaimed it. They lost perspective, lost whatever it is in man that tries to avoid the profligate waste of young and middle aged life.

You don’t know where they stand. If only they were good as the architecture of the NASS building. Whoever built them sure had style. The gleaming white walls, the pop ceiling. I think the amphitheatre and the dome was overdone, of course, I know Nigerians have a tendency to overdo a lot of things. Well, at least some of the tax payers money went for something beautiful and as stylish and attractive as a cinder block.

To Nigerians, who rarely had enough of anything, “having enough” meant having more than anyone else. Pure evidence of a national inferiority complex, and have to remind oneself that people who feel themselves inferior have a pathological desire to disprove their own perceptions. It still surprised me that love and hate were emotions so finely matched in the human mind. That one factor going through the Hansard appeared to dominate all aspects of the proceedings of the 9th NASS, displacing mere logic as the basis for reaching consensus even getting into murky waters as each first had to satisfy own paranoia that no tricks would be played by the other, and, this has been the order of the day since 1999.

The degree to which this crop of lawmakers and politicians raising more of substantive question than answers mesmerised each other in the process was at one and the same time amusing and supremely dangerous even to PMB, and that has affected its objectivity as a national stabilising political creature that has changed nothing in the nation.

The nation’s problems of debts, mounting recurrent overhead and electoral irregularities amongst many other wouldn’t end if all the false perceptions were laid to rest, but at least things could be more manageable. One had to admit to oneself that this might be as false a panacea.

Let’s drop the shop talk, and see the brutish threats to the nation’s democracy for what they are.
i. The banditry and assaults in and around the nation,
ii. The NDDC politics,
iii. The Electoral Act dissensions,
iv. The loans deal with details in the press, and already certain members of the NASS were saying how fair it was – and why don’t we just agree to it.

But the threats didn’t come from the president or the people; as always, it came from the politicians inside the NASS and their mistakes. Symbols were far easier to produce than substance. Its irony that the lawmakers perhaps know the significance of their own worries, – but not its substance.

The senate President and chairman of the joint NASS has charm, and power – the sort of visceral presence that came with his post, but for one, he doesn’t to me look like a shrewd politician, not precise, not so careful about everything. He was always in a hurry and stubbornly rigid.

This raised a number of posers about the personality and colour of the nation’s NASS leadership.
What sort of man is he?
What was his politics and what was he after?
In what direction was he taking the legislature and what does his attitude portend for the nation’s nascent democracy and his political vulnerability. Why are members opposed to the electoral Act or was the president’s evaluation incorrect?
Do the NASS know something that the people don’t?
Or was it all part of the grand game. The grandest game there was.

The NASS had a sense of unusual prescience or obstinacy as a pretension, though wary and smugly satisfied that the nation needed its help and therefore could effect some damage control in a game of the throne that was inimical to the nation’s peace. Must power and ambitions make our politicians invulnerable to human concerns. It was sad, terribly so, that the force that drove ambitions could suppress their humanity. It is foolhardy to state that the NASS with the carriage of a snake that had just swallowed something large enough, must note that the safety of democracy superseded any mundane rules.

The sky was clear and blue, the deeper blue that comes from being above most of the atmosphere, what was not clear was about the nation’s politicians and their true and real intentions. The NASS are expected to be pragmatics, even, as they become aware of the fact that the nation’s problems, while complex, did have a solution. It should be more a question of not destroying so much that there would be nothing left with which to negotiate.

It had been recognised early on that the NASS were using the hallowed chambers offensive weapon with a defensive mission; that the ability to destroy the ‘opponent’ was the classical formula both to prevent ‘war’ and achieve one’s goal in peace. The fact that such power accrued to both sides, had transformed the historically proven formula of unilateral intimidation into a bilateral deterrence, however, made that solution unpalatable.

It meant that the political equation was destined to return to the classic balance of offense and defense, that both elements could now be made part of a single strategy. This view, of course, may be simplistic. No system would ever be foolproof and even if the system worked, political leaders would find a way to use it to the greatest disadvantage; you could always depend on politicians for that. In any case, it’s not any immediate threat to the nation by any stretch of the imagination, but its development the nation could have done without.

Now to some deep thinking, now that the nation had the middle of the line, but neither end, or simply put, making here nor there a permanent destination, it’s not too late for that sort of deep thinking. One was not concerned that the NASS and the presidency would see its defense systems as a rationale for an offensive strike. In a crisis like this, however, their very existence could mitigate the fear that has prevented the nation’s launch into the threshold of world politics and standard.

Nobody, and that includes mister president, is invisible. However, those whom the gods would destroy, they first made mad. That’s not the way Sophocles said it. So few of the lawmakers in that ‘retirement chamber’ and the presidency, in their grim majesty viewed themselves as the ultimate arbiters and regarded rules as incoviniences to be ignored, knew what combat was like. People were so easy to frighten. But combat taught a man what to fear and what to ignore. With the benefit of hindsight, I know its pretty difficult to pin PMB. He could perhaps be swayed only with arguments based on principle, and I doubt if any political realism and or political Frankenstein monsters would change that.

A lot of things happen because of what there was in the past and the nation was existing in the past and in a new deluxe edition. There are things that should be made known as a definite part of the nation’s history or else those who aimed at eventual power being placed in their hands, in the future would return a verdict of misadventure.

The government with its recent recurrent ephemeral growth without corresponding development had undergone substantial lateral movements, which appeared to have distracted it from the present day realities and conspiracy of silence. Constant criticism has deadened its enthusiasm in the Dickensian slum with bad social conditions and a narrative of why the nation was disunited and was not working paradigm shifts in the conception of contemporary governance in light of output growing and the teeming mass of humanity growing poorer.

The mass of the people were on edge and have lost faith with government’s plans and programme, the government on its part have seen no occasion to blink or unveil the truth about the nation’s true conditions and situations, as it kept fumbling along. The system thus need a talk shop on ‘post-realism’ and the debate on the near value in crisis in the modern world, and the options to adopt by a nation approaching an unknown world.

Post-realism offers a solution to a highly dangerous world of competing perspectives where everyone supposes they are right. While philosopher assert realism as the solution to our post-truth age, the key problems of self-reference, the open-ended nature of reality and realism’s blunt approach to disagreements mean that it cannot be the future of philosophy. Post-realism, without abandoning empiricism and nationalism, makes sense of our relationship to an unknown world and provides a way forward to a more inclusive and effective means of intervention.

Realism is needed to stand up to the falsehoods and the tyrannies of power and its toxic outcome. As if the trusty sword of truth is the way to down dictators and confront the misapprehensions of the mob. It is a fine idea, but a few moments of reflection uncover its illusions. The sword of truth is likely to lead to crusading wars between those who have an unswerving belief in their own rightness, as it is to lead to a utopian democracy of the good and well meaning.

The momentum of events should bring the 9th NASS to live up to expectations of the people, even as they bring the nation out of the dark ages and its politics and into the 21st century era of political thoughts and aspirations, if the nation’s democracy must evolve into something approaching an egalitarian socialist state.

In the face of daunting and overwhelming security breaches and challenges, power and energy crisis, the 9th NASS behaving as a wing of the PMB’s APC have defaulted, therefore, wrong in their moral mathematics. Nigerians, don’t expect their leaders to rub their feet while feeding them grapes, though, they deserve more than that, are exhausted and heavy hearted with the greed and reckless indiscretion of their leaders.

The ruling elites have to begin to correct the opinions of Nigerians that they are in an age when politicians twist the truth to enhance the bottom line. Think of the pain and grief that have resulted from the numerous political crisis, and summon the courage and political will to say “these tragedies must end”.

For the benefit of the nation and its development, the willows need to be pollarded, in the process, cut off the top systemically, so that many new thin ‘branches’ will grow. The mix of age and youth would bore well for the nation, in youth there’s vigour, and in the elderly, there’s age, wisdom, vision, understanding and foresight. Nigeria needs the collective aggregate of the two.
I submit.

#JimiBickersteth

Jimi Bickersteth is a blogger, writer and public affairs analyst.
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