Rawanin Buzu

Except in narratives created by a colourful imagination, good triumphs over evil relatively consistently. That probably means that humanity, as expressed on the cosmic big picture, is striving and setting up good as a fundamental ideal.

In everyday life, good and evil exist together and must exist together – one needing the other in order to give meaning to the idea. It is a binary paradox wherein one part cannot and will not tolerate the other yet at the same time one cannot exist without the other. Looking at the world as a whole and throughout history, it looks like good triumphs more often on the small scale, with subjects helping and looking out for each other and for the community for instance – whereas evil seems to triumph more on the large scale when you look at it from say the perspective of government plutocrats, cultural and religious institutions as well as corporations lording it over populations for their own gain. It appears that the bigger the entity, the more prone to evil it is.

The way I see it, there are two classes of evil among humans, at least those who come from this part of the world, the two being rational and irrational evil. The most common evil is rational and has its roots in the natural concept of competition for resources and reproductive success. People who own the access to resources, in the human world that is money and political power, want to hoard it for their own gain. The hoarding instinct is stronger than the sharing instinct, more so beyond the confines of personal identity. When a colony of ants hoards all the seeds it can drag back into the labyrinths, and fights other creatures who raid the stash, we don’t call that evil. But among people we call it greed. And it is greed – because we know better. When a silverback defeats another silverback becoming leader of the troop and claiming all mating rights for himself without consulting the females themselves, we don’t call that evil either. But in humans we would, and should… because we know better.

The other evil is irrational evil. This is where mentally deranged people go on killing sprees for example. Something an Abubakar Shekau would do. So it often seems like evil is more powerful, because good has structural limits and has to stick to rules of fairness and integrity and doing no harm, whereas evil has no such limits.

Looking at the history of this country from 1999 to date, it looks like both good and evil are expanding, but I think good is ultimately winning over evil, even though most people actually believe that it is the other way round. But that is of course not by a wide margin, and much too slow, but hopefully speeding up recently and maybe after the choice we must make in 2023, we will have lift-off or a meltdown. That is the point, but bear with me a little bit.

Nigeria, or the world as a whole, is a very small place these days. Our ability to travel faster and farther, and the advent of things like the internet were supposed to make us feel less isolated from each other and also make us all feel less estranged and more like a human, national community. Somehow, it seems not to have worked that way at face value. We hear about evil deeds, but the deeds are seldom punished. But they actually are – in that they are being exposed and will be held accountable, somehow, somewhere we are more and more confident of. We see how institutional evil is affecting not just our own communities, but everyone everywhere in the country whatever their identity happens to be. Our primal consciousness experiences compassion for others across the Niger and beyond because now we can see and hear about them via the media. Ironically, the media bringing us closer together is also showing signs of evil, talking about misinformation and premeditated manipulation. On some level, we are materially learning that our fates are linked together as human beings so it is in our interest that we are fair-minded, that we mean and act well for each other, for our own good. So the goodwill that exists among family will overflow into the community and onward into the fabric of the nation – this is a necessity more than it is a humanistic rationale.

For whatever reason, our traditional faultlines are not the question this time. I note, with glee, that there is very little talk about the showdown between a Fulani and a Yoruba. For about half of this primal divide, it is heads you lose, tails I win kind of thing. Both are Muslims. There is this uncanny subtle spin in the mix which you can make out from the daily theatrics and it is that it is not about those differences, it might actually be about good and evil!

Where I come from, you are never going to see a Buzu (a Tuareg) without his headdress. This is so much that such a scenario is likened to the type of rapture that will answer every question you have, so you don’t hold your breath while expecting to see that. A rawanin buzu, the Tuareg’s turban is part of Tuareg’s head. You only see it on the ground when the head is on the ground itself and you do not want to be around when that happens. Either that, or you really want to be around for that.

What the coin toss in 2023 will determine is not whether the Buzu in the picture would indeed lose his turban as a fallout of one of the two gladiators (Atiku and Tinubu) winning and the other losing – the turban is on the ground regardless. This is clearly a bridgehead for good, a clear pivot has been achieved. Whether this pivot will be a force for good or evil is also a different matter.

Unless you overindulge your imagination, you know that it is either heads or tails when you flip a coin. So it is going to be APC or PDP, Tinubu or Atiku. But then sometimes, coins do end up standing on their curved edges. So, the Chaos Theory may pull the rug off everyone’s feet to crown Kwankwaso or Obi. This is what it comes to – from where I am standing. Heads or tails, or even something else… the Tuareg will lose his headdress in 2023.

Huzaifa jega