Episode 2 – In the buildup to the 2011 elections, a reporter asked the same IBB, who was a contestant; “Don’t you think it is time to allow the younger generations take over from you the older ones as it happened in America and other parts of the World?”
“Honestly, it is our wish that God will bring the younger people that will take over from us if they are available. I was the one who introduced the politics of new breed in this country”.
IBB answered. The reporter egged on; “Why didn’t you step aside and give the younger generation a chance to lead since they are fresh and strong”. To which the General again replied “Because we have seen signs that they are not capable of leading this country and so we feel we should help them. Maybe they are not given the proper education that is why”. Ok, we all know he started the demise of Nigerian education…. But that’s not the point.
For saying the above, all we young people could do is to ‘lambast’ IBB ignoring the real issues. Love him or hate him, IBB is an enigma in Nigeria, and has the international recognition to back it up. Mr Johnnie Carson, CIA top dog and a key architect of President Jonathan’s ascension to office, had visited IBB at home just before the above interview, and IBB stated in the same interview that he had a long acquaintance with Carson, who visited him and his dying wife, Maryam, in hospital in California. Nigerian youth failed to learn any lesson about the permutations of power from those words, but we are very good at hurling insults. Will we ever learn? In truth, the ability to keep quiet and strategise, to show caution and to throw fewer tantrums, is an indication of readiness to lead. From the dreadful insults we hurl against each other on cyberspace, to the inability to sustain any argument without flying off on an insultive tangent, we may be showing that very inability to lead that IBB spoke about. But learn we must.
Episode 3 – The event was the graduation of 20 participants from the National Defence College in Abuja just this month. In his lecture, General Babangida declared “I can say without equivocation that our democracy faces no danger from the military”. He went on “As I said in 1991, Military Coup is no longer fashionable”.
This was at a point when some Nigerian youths, in their frustration with the failings of Nigeria and its democracy, and the seeming rigmarole with bad governance, with every new one turning out worse than the previous one, were subtly clamouring/hoping for the military to return. They think ruefully about the ‘good old days’ of the Military, and wonder why no existing officer is brave enough to ‘seize power’. Well, IBB said unequivocally; ‘forget it!’, it is no longer the in-thing. When will my generation ever learn? But why is this so?
Now hereunder is the real dynamics of power as it relates to Nigeria, and such as explains where Nigeria finds itself today;
After the USA put Britain and France under immense pressure to release colonized countries in the 1950s, leading to the ‘independence’ of most of them in the early 1960s, we found out that a rash of coup d’etats happened in Africa, leading to the toppling of perhaps EVERY government that the Brits or French had helped to install. Looking back today, it is fairly obvious that the colonial masters really (or “naively”) tried to ensure that their subject countries got the best leaders – gentlemen, poets and intellectuals like Awolowo, Zik, Sardauna, Tafawa Balewa, Nkrumah, Leopold Senghor, Julius Nyerere – even a fiery and sincere soul like Patrice Lumumba was ‘mistakenly’ installed by the Belgians. Yet all of them were removed from government for one reason or the other, and Africa basically ‘crashlanded’ ever before she took off. The truth is that the USA and USSR, being the winners of the Second World War, played ping-pong with many post-colonial African countries in that period known as the Cold War era. Most of the coup d’etats were sponsored by one or the other. If the USA financed and planned a coup, the USSR did a counter-coup. The bloodshed, the angst, the remnants of hatred, the civil wars and genocides, remained in Africa!
The USA was by far more strategy-oriented compared with the USSR, and therefore better positioned to harness the gains of its interventions in different countries. Declassified documents are today available detailing these interventions – the coups, the assassinations, the civil wars that were stoked and aided… Another great advantage was the English Language. Today, the USA has within it, natives of every country in the world, thinking for her, and often strategically, against their home countries. USSR could not get to that strategic advantage, and even though it made a few overtures in that area, she had her own internal problems, which led to the implosion of 1989 and its subsequent dismemberment.
Starting from around 1979 under Jimmy Carter, and later under Ronald Reagan, the American strategy changed. The world was becoming uni-polar, with only one superpower (USA). Therefore, we would go in only one direction – the one dictated by the USA. China, the new emerging power knows better than to compete on that level, but it has perhaps a surer long-term strategy even as the USA kicks about these days, scheming to elongate its reign as the ONLY superpower. Ronald Reagan consolidated the idea that if the USA will finance any coup, any ‘bastard’ (as they referred to dictators) that it installed, should be put under pressure to organize democratic elections. Gradually, the USA evolved a process where it does not have to sponsor coups anymore, but can manipulate its own civilian ‘bastards’ into positions, and dispose of them if they start getting smart ideas. That is the era we live in, and why coups can no longer be possible. Who will sponsor the coups? Not the USA (she’s all about the democratic rhetoric these days), not Russia, not China. And local coups will always fail.
One last episode. General IBB had once mentioned what he called the “Doctrine of Nigeria’s Settled Issues” which are Nigeria’s unity, its republican constitution, the states as federating units and wait for this… capitalism! Now, whose idea is Capitalism? And is there any wonder why we have emerged into one of the countries with the largest gap between rich and poor? But alas, when the young people are too distracted to learn what really matters, the old men will continue to play them about till they die. And they will live really long. After which the children of the old men will continue. We better wake up!
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