Stories Papa Reuben must tell his leader when they eventually meet
Several issues crowd out an already fevered imagination this week. Some are international in nature, while one or two are national. Since they are all critically related, they cannot be regarded as matters miscellaneous, to directly lift a phrase from Olatunji Dare, the illustrious, Kabba-born master columnist whose fetching prose and wondrous insights adorned this paper until recently. First is the centenary celebration of Pa Reuben Famuyide Fasoranti, an apostolic disciple of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and a man of sterling honesty and pristine integrity who clocked a hundred years about a week ago.
A reserved and taciturn gentleman in the old Yoruba tradition of gnomic forbearance, Fasoranti is as modest and understated as they come until foolhardiness leads the heedless to step on the cobra’s tail. That is when innate shyness gives way to fatal ferocity. Next is the thirtieth anniversary of the departure of the avatar himself, Obafemi Awolowo, a departure once described by this writer as the longest goodbye in Nigeria’s political history. Three decades after his passing and translation to immortality, Awolowo continues to exert a hold on Nigeria’s political imagination which is unprecedented and a tad short of the mystical and extraordinary. It has been a long goodbye indeed.
Finally, there is the global embroilment and disenfranchisement of liberal democracy as the most successful paradigm of human governance in the last three hundred years and as a panacea for economic woes and universal misery. Almost everywhere you turn in a troubled world, democracy is on the boil, beset with many painful and excruciating boils and on the most delicate parts of the human anatomy, too. It requires precise lancing and professional handling lest it infects the entire body. Wracked by bodily pains from multiple carbuncles, restricted to bed and tormented beyond description by the appalling mess, Karl Marx, the father of modern revolutions, famously vowed that he would make sure the bourgeoisie paid for every one of the boils that tortured him. But this time around, it is not on the scaffolding of revolutionary retribution that the bourgeois class is made to pay for their errancy but on the gallows of democracy, their most radical and fertile invention.
Last Wednesday, gunshots were heard inside the hallowed precincts of the Philippine’s senate. It was Katakata in Manila. It was not the dawn of a new revolution, otherwise the son of Ferdinand Marcos, the same tyrant who had fled the people’s wrath forty years earlier, would not be presiding. It was to arrest a serving senator, Ronald Dela Rosa who is wanted by the ICC at the Hague. Meanwhile the Vice President and daughter of the preceding president, Sara Duterte, who had been fingered on many charges of corruption, sleaze and conspiracy to murder, is facing impeachment proceedings at the lower house. It was the same fickle and unstable masses that elected them that was now braying for her blood. Her father, Rudrigo Duterte, the former president, is in captivity at the Hague at the instance of the International Criminal Court on charges of corruption and extrajudicial elimination of many of his own compatriots, an allegation which made him popular and wildly adulated in many sectors of his country.
While this was going on, King Charles was addressing the British parliament in all pomp and pageantry. The ghost of Oliver Cromwell, a prime tormentor of his distant ancestors, had long been banished from the vicinity, his remains exhumed and visited with horrific mutilations before being thrown away. But this has not stopped anything. While the noble king was at it, the descendants of Cromwell were busy intriguing and plotting how to see off their leader. Two years earlier, Sir Keir Starmer, a political greenhorn who had done meritorious services in human rights, was swept into office in a land slide .It was partly because he was not a regular politician. But two years in office, Starmer’s own cup seems to have run over after a series of misjudgment, avoidable gaffes and unforced errors which appear to have put a question mark on his leadership capability and ability to lead a fractured and fragmented polity.
Starmer is a decent working class boy without too many axes to grind with the old order, a complete contrast to the former Labour leader, the malignantly leftwing Jeremy Corbin who had been adjudged unelectable because of his cheerfully polarizing and divisive nature. This is the central contradiction at the heart of contemporary British leftwing politics. Labour has deserted old labour. The working class is not a viable majority and as the texture of actual work changes in the age of AI and industrial restructuring, the old working class will find itself further marginalized and banished to the margins. It is a measure of how low Starmer’s stock had fallen that last week, a leading magazine in England dismissed him on its front cover as Keir Karma for doing everything he said he would not do when he was seeking office. Karma is a merciless master of retribution indeed.
Meanwhile, the view from the other side of the Atlantic where democracy was exported quite a while ago by daring revolutionary nonconformists and radical iconoclasts is equally gloomy and forbidding. America has taught the modern civilized world many positive and emancipatory things. But the world’s greatest democracy is also currently embroiled in a homeland crisis of democracy all of its own. Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is unraveling at the seams, exposed as the monstrous outpouring of a mountebank and cynical charlatan. The mesmerizing master of mass manipulation and industrial-scale induced optimism has been reduced to a pitiable, pathetic shadow of his former bubbling and boastful self. How the rubbish could find favour in the country of intellectual hegemons in the first instance remains the political mystery of the century and a scandalous indictment of liberal democracy and its tendency to wilt in the face of mob hysteria. As he left for China with his tail between his legs having led his country into a disastrous quagmire in Iran, there are many of his country people and former supporters who couldn’t care a hoot if he decides to stay put there.
By some sublime irony of history, Donald Trump appears to be in excellent company but via a different route. By conviction and rigour of historical analysis, the Chinese are cheerfully contemptuous of liberal democracy and its hallowed tenets. In this, they seem to have sided with their founding philosopher that democracy is too valuable a tool of human emancipation to be left at the mercy of the masses and undisciplined rabble. According to Confucius, democracy can only succeed to the extent that the fickle people and their anarchic impulses are held in check by a conclave of wise people who direct and channel their aspirations towards the greatest good of the greatest number of people.
Given the tremors and global convulsions that have plagued liberal democracy, the sharp lurch to the right and xenophobic nationalism in Britain and many western and Asian countries, perhaps it may well be time to take another look at the tenets themselves rather than being fixated on the actors. Could this be traced and attributed to a crisis of rising expectations as a result of a sharp rise in human consciousness which in itself can be attributed to prosperity subsequently suborned by exploding demographic? In the circumstance, liberal democracy may be a victim of its own earlier success.
Riding on the cusp of transformative ideas emerging from the age of Enlightenment, it led in the west to a radical overhaul of the nature of man’s relationship with his society and environment triggering in the process a brave new world of sturdy individualism, the rise of nascent capitalism, modernity and Industrial Revolution in England which brought unprecedented prosperity to the metropolitan centre, leaving huge swathes of the rest of the world to be conquered or enslaved at will. For many of these societies, liberal democracy would prove a veritable Trojan horse which brings neither development nor true democracy. Without mass literacy, massive education and the satisfaction of the basic material needs of the populace, liberal democracy is a cruel hoax as it has proved in postcolonial Africa and elsewhere else.
