Let us cut this country some slack at the beginning of what is likely to be another momentous year. Some congratulations are in order for this enchanting country and its tough, hardened habitants for bracing through the past year with all its internal challenges and emergent international contradictions. As the Yoruba wise-saying would have it, the head does not always wish to stand in structural alignment with the nape and the rest of the torso. Only the master surgeon of human physiognomy knows how this is stitched together. A more profane version of this proverb has it that the testicular pouch of a ram may swing wildly from side to side, but it never falls. The lizard that jumps from the top of the Iroko tree to the bare ground says that if no one will congratulate it, it must congratulate itself.
Nigerians are a prayerful lot. Only a people specially favoured by the Gods would choose to live so dangerously and permanently at the edge of the precipice and still survive to tell the story. But as Bernard Shaw, the Anglo-Irish wit, cynic and merciless purveyor of western rationalism would have it, we must beware of people whose Gods are in the sky. If we ask the old codger that he should leave us alone to our joyous proclivities, and that he has no right to legislate for other people, he would probably shoot back: I hate people being happy when they should be unhappy.
But even for a people who love pomp and celebration, the instant jubilation and mutual hand-pumping which ought to have accompanied Peter Obi’s decamping from the Labour Party was rather muted and underwhelming. No one should be surprised, coming at a point when Peter Obi’s movement has lost much of its capacity to surprise and the momentum it has garnered. While it slithered down the ladder of national esteem, the other side gathered speed and substantial grit. While it encouraged its trolls and sidekicks to excoriate and slander those who expressed views contrary to their siege mentality and claustrophobic sense of entitlement, the other side began chipping away at its ramparts until the empire of froth and hate caved in from its own internal contradictions.
Quality people deserted the Gadarene mob. A prime example is Peter Mbah, the energetic and hardworking governor of Enugu State, who has disavowed the possibility of joining Obi in his quixotic quest. Since politics is still a game of number and ethnic identity remains a stellar plank of national politics, it is hard to see how Peter Obi in the few months remaining can reassemble the old faithful even if he goes ahead to win the ADC presidential ticket. Some notable Nigerians who have worked for him at the highest level have sad tales to tell. It will not be fair to spill the beans at this point. Obi does not seem to have the allure and steely composure of a pan-Nigerian leader. A gifted but divisive and polarizing figure, politically, culturally and spiritually, it is so sad and alarming that the Nigerian ruling hegemons now view an Obi presidential ticket as the death knell of post-military politics in the country.
Rather than lose it all, they seem to have bought into a significant stake in the ruling party. One year may be a long spell in politics and in his desperation Obi may try to raise the ethnic and hate decibel; and the abiding economic misgivings hoping to catch out the ungainly and chaotic amalgam that is the APC as it tries to smother its internal contradictions and head off the possibility of a catastrophic implosion. In their brilliant conclusion to the book, The Gods that Failed, the authors noted that the final battle will not be between progressives and conservatives but between progressives and former progressives. That may well be the battle that is shaping up. The situation is so “overdetermined”, to use an advanced philosophical parlance, with so many contradictions jostling and contending for supremacy, that it is impossible for a political titan however talented to have a complete mastery of the situation.
