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Nigeria’s newly minted ‘Professors
Emeritus’ of History and co-founders of the prestigious Arewa School of
History, Ibrahim Babangida, Muhammadu Buhari, and Abdulsalami Abubakar, have
been in the eye of the storm lately. Their first task, as competitors with the
likes of Kenneth Dike, J.F.K. Ade Ajayi, Obaro Ikime, I.A. Akinjogbin, Adiele
Afigbo, Abdullahi Smith, Bala Usman, Elizabeth Isichei, and Toyin Falola for
the position of Pontifex Maximus of Nigerian history, was to restore a
much-misunderstood “hero” of our recent past to his rightful place in history.
Their subject was no other than Sani Abacha, the dark-goggled character we all
believed was a perfect hybridization of the worst attributes of Jean-Bedel
Bokassa, Mobutu Sese Seko, Etienne Gnassingbé Eyadema, Hastings Kamuzu Banda,
Idi Amin Dada, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Daniel Arap Moi, and other hard working
traducers of African humanity.
In order to help Nigerians
recalibrate their famously unreliable memory, the three ‘Professors’
co-authored a seminal paper whose findings they made public recently in Kano,
during activities organized by the Abacha family to mark the 10th
anniversary of the death of their Maigida. The historians’ brilliant
submissions could be summarized, albeit inexhaustively, under five significant
rubrics: (1) Sani Abacha was a saint, (2) Sani Abacha did not steal one
kobo, (3) Sani Abacha was the best thing that ever happened to Nigeria,
(3) Sani Abacha was a saint, (4) Sani Abacha did not steal one kobo, (5) Sani
Abacha was the best thing that ever happened to Nigeria. Predictably, Nigerians
cried foul over what they believe to be a cynical attempt by the three
emergency historians to give recent Nigerian history an extreme makeover. Angry
commentators accused the troika of raping history in broad daylight, an act
made all the more despicable by the fact that the consequences of Abacha’s
madness still haunt a nation-space he violated. Critics countered that
empirical evidence of Abacha’s gargantuan heists exist in the public space, as
career receivers of stolen property in the Western world have seemingly run out
of containers to ship the raw cash Abacha stole back to Nigeria.
Internet pundits and newspaper
commentators have established a long list of possible motives for the troika’s
attempt at historical revisionism. One school of opinion has it that the
restitutive gesture of the Arewa historians cannot be divorced from the north’s
amorphous agenda of internal colonialism and domination, spelt out in terms of
a bacchanal lust for Federal power and the economic resources of the south on
the one hand, and the beatification of northern villains as part of an
insidious imposition of northern symbols on the national psyche on the other
hand. Other commentators read class interest and elite solidarity into the
utterances of the Professors. While these explanations are attractive on the
surface, they do not account for the deeper psychological mechanisms at work.
Psychology, I suggest, is where the real meat lies.
The individual trajectories of the
three ‘Professors’ – the paths taken to Kano – must be borne in mind as we
attempt to navigate their opaque psychologies. Before they self-imagined as
national historians and Abacha’s private griots, all three had taken turns to
set Nigeria back by several decades as military despots. Like the man they sought
to beatify in Kano, all three were khaki tyrants. We must therefore find our
answers in the complex psychology of the tyrant. If we proceed carefully along
these lines, we may well discover that many of the justifiably angry pundits
who have screamed themselves hoarse since the Generals poured filth into our
space of discourse – where is Prof. Pat Utomi when you really need him to
lament the state of public discourse? - have inadvertently ascribed a degree of
humanity that no dictator possesses to the three funny characters.
The argument that the Generals were
taking care of their own by attempting to smuggle their brother, Sani Abacha,
into a cozy corner of Nigerian history can only stand on the presupposition
that these characters really care about Abacha. This presupposition goes
against everything history teaches us about the funny pathology of tyrants.
Whether we are studying Hitler, Stalin, Ceausescu, Franco, Mussolini, or any of
Africa’s petty tyrants, we are confronted with a deviant psychology that stands
on two synonymous legs: nombrilism and narcissism. Absent from the ontological
constitution of the tyrant is that crucial essence of the human: the ability to
project the self into other selves and be defined or affected by the humanity
of those selves. For regular humanity, especially in Africa, what the
philosopher Charles Taylor calls “the sources of the self” is valid only in the
context of meaningful imbrication with the environment, the social, and other
humanizing selves. For the tyrant, there is only one source of the self: the
self. Just that one miserable self! I am, therefore I am is the tyrant’s
epistemic subversion of the Cartesian cogito. Other selves have meaning for the
tyrant only insofar as he is able to instrumentalize them for pernicious
personal gains. Hence, Babangida is incapable of caring about anybody except
Babangida. Ditto for Buhari and Abubakar.
This logic extends to the argument
that the Generals’ utterances are a reflection of their leadership role as
servicers of a deleterious northern agenda. Nothing could be farther from the
truth. Admittedly, northern will to domination is as real as it is deadly. We
need not go beyond the foolish thesis of Maitama Sule on the north’s Manifest
Destiny to govern Nigeria for evidence of the existence of this national
incubus. Northern power periodically chops off southern heads as a symbolic
reminder of its determination to maintain the status quo of Nigeria’s internal
colonialism: Isaac Boro, Christopher Okigbo, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Dele Giwa, Gideon
Akaluka, M.K.O Abiola, Suliat Adedeji, and Kudirat Abiola. I fear for Dokubo
Asari, Henry Okah, and Ralph Uwazurike when next northern power feels the need
to make a symbolic statement… I’ve answered the names Pius Adebola Adesanmi my whole
life. I am Yoruba. Very Yoruba. Yet, the north defines me as a northerner to
make up the supposedly superior census numbers that are so crucial to this
agenda. Naturally, I have no say in the matter. Sunday Bolorunduro Awoniyi, a
Yoruba man from my neighbourhood, was a window-dressing leader of the Arewa
Consultative Forum until his death!
This nebulous but deadly northern
agenda exists to advance the interests and the cause of the north as a
geo-political entity within the failed state called Nigeria and to maintain
Nigeria’s integrity as a worthy slave of her Western masters. Given this fact,
it stands to reason that those who are interpellated by this agenda must, of
necessity, care deeply about the north. This implies a social concern
that should translate into economic advancement and progress for that part of
the country in all spheres of development. Yet, the north has always been
Nigeria’s metonym for backwardness, illiteracy, underdevelopment, poverty, and
maladjusted conservatism. I should know. I lived in Sokoto and Kaduna and have
traveled extensively all over the north. For all the oil they have colonized in
the south, northern leadership behaves as if Moslems from another planet built
the hyper-modernities they go to admire in Dubai and Kuwait City. The picture
is simply not good. The terrible condition of northern humanity is a sorry
proof of the wickedness of northern leadership. For instance, Babangida perches
atop an eyesore of a city in his obscene fifty-bedroom hilltop mansion in Minna.
I suppose he is too high up to hear the rumbles in the empty stomachs of the
yaws-ridden, polio-infested Almajirai in town. Buhari’s hometown of Daura is in
even worse shape. In essence, the current state of the north is ample evidence
that the three Generals do not care about the north. Their pathology as petty
tyrants predisposes them to obsess only about themselves. Let’s not humanize
them by claiming that they spoke out of some altruistic concern for the north.
They are not capable of loving the north. They can only love themselves.
It bears repeating. The foolish
attempt by the Generals to rewrite history was neither about Abacha nor about
the north. They cannot care about Abacha and the north. What is at play
here is another aspect of the psychology of petty tyrants: an incurable
obsession with memory and history. Dictators continually obsess about their
legacy, their place and space in history, and how they will be remembered.
Unable to control the future, they fill the present with symbologies that they
hope would swing the future in their favour. This explains the expenditure of
national resources, energy, and time on the fabrication of self-aggrandizing
personal myths, the dubious replacement of genuine national narratives with
worthless personal narratives (Eyadema’s myth of Sarakawa, Obasanjo’s myth of
May 29 as Democracy Day), the endless construction of statues and monuments,
and the risible attempts to inflect national discourse at every turn. Babangida
is demonstrably the most obsessed of the three. He has been busy trying to
write his own flattering epitaph since 1993. And he has had help from hungry
journalists, yeye Professors, former Marxist scholars turned hagiographers for
the “prince of the Niger”, and other belly-aided characters on his payroll. The
Kano episode is another phase of this diabolical project.
Although they try to predetermine
the future, no dictator has ever had the Mosaic privilege of catching a glimpse
of that future from afar. This is where the troika of Babangida, Buhari, and
Abdulsalami differs. These dictators have had the extraordinary privilege of
living their own future. It is an unpleasant experience. Abacha is the future
of Babangida, Buhari, and Abdulsalami. In Abacha’s aftermath, the three are terrified
living witnesses to how history intends to deal with the military rapists of
Nigeria’s destiny. This terrible knowledge is part of their punishment. It is
history’s way of exacting revenge on behalf of Nigeria and Nigerians. Abacha is
the mirror history waves daily in the faces of the three despots. They look
into that mirror and hate what they see. They are scared. In Abacha, they know
how history will remember them. What happened in Kano is a most eloquent
indication of the personal torment of these characters. What they were trying
to rewrite are the narratives they now know that history will surely write
about them when they are gone. When they scream in unison, “Sani Abacha did not
steal one kobo”, “Sani Abacha was a Saint”, “Sani Abacha was the best thing
that happened to Nigeria”, all you need do is remove Sani Abacha, make the
appropriate substitutions, and you arrive at Babangida as the subject of all
three statements. Repeat the same substitution exercise for Buhari and
Abubakar. That is what they were really saying in Kano. It was about them. Not
Abacha. Not the north. That is what they want said of them when they are long
gone. Got the picture? It’s always about the tyrant. All three are
determined to delete the evils they did and ensure that the myths they
fabricate live after them. If it means dancing on Abacha’s grave, so be it!
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Posted by Robot| 24.06.2008 13:19