The strangeness of democratic change By Tatalo Alamu

by  Tatalo Alamu
God bless Honore de Balzac, wherever he may be at this moment. The great French novelist lived the impossible contradictions of post-revolutionary France as if he was himself a character in a great novel. In order to chronicle for posterity the tormenting improbabilities of his beloved nation with as much fidelity and accuracy as possible, Balzac simply appointed himself a honorary secretary of the society. From this vantage observatory and ringside listening post, Balzac began churning out great historical novels.
But so consumed was the great man by this moveable feast of superior reality that at the end of his life, Balzac was no longer able to separate reality from fiction. On his death bed, Balzac was heard screaming for his favourite physician to come and attend to him. “ Call me Banchioc!! Only Banchioc can save me now!” But there was a minor problem. Banchioc indeed was not a life or living doctor. He was actually one of Balzac’s own greatest fictional creations.

As we are beginning to understand in Nigeria, the notion of democratic change may well be a violent oxymoron; an impossible misnomer.  So it is that almost five months after the historic election that swept off the ancien regime, the change project is beginning to look like some compelling fiction. And what an absolutely magical yarn it is turning out to be. With its strange twists and turns, the change mantra is beginning to strike one as the work of a fabulist of cosmic talents.
Take just one sampler. A fortnight ago and in the wake of the widespread revulsion and national recrimination that accompanied his arraignment on allegations bordering on criminal self-enrichment, you would have thought that Bukola Saraki was a goner. Political obituarists—yours sincerely honorably included—were already oiling and inking their felt pens and rubbing their hands in relish about the prospects of the young man honorably falling on his own sword.
But two weeks later, the selfsame Saraki ,supported by a whopping eighty one senators including about thirty five dissidents from his own party, is not only defending in depth and strength but has gone on the political offensive to the bargain sending the fear of the Lord into prospective ministers and the ministration of change itself. Some of the prospective ministers and fiercest zealots of the change ministry are reported to be lobbying the rogue senators. Welcome to the last tango in Paris.

Despite the mantra of change, or most probably because “revolutions” must also revolve, one or two of the ministerial wannabes are said to have sent in some friendly fliers of a fiscal nature to the hard and hardened honorables. It is turning out to be an ethical maelstrom and in a rare triumph of pragmatic politics over gung-ho principles, President Buhari himself has had to write a most cajoling and faintly anodyne letter to the Senate President, a fellow he almost certainly holds in furious contempt. And this is discounting a famous photo-op in which the two protagonists can be seen grinning from ear to ear. It doesn’t get more fabulously galling.

But we must not despair. This is what you get when change comes on the wings of democratic evolution rather than on the cusp of a violent revolution. It is often a messy and chaotic affair, unlike the neat decapitations associated with revolutionary convulsions. For those who see change as a radical rupture with the past; a new beginning with immediate effect and a turbulent and tumultuous regime change occasioning much violence, tears and gnashing of teeth, the shabby stalemate in the Nigerian Senate and the occasional rousing of the regnant forces of reaction and retrogression is a sad tale of change ambushed.
But given the current balance of force, a storming of the anti-democratic Bastille or what we had proposed as the Nigerian Senatorial Shogunate is out of the question. As we warned much earlier, the President cannot afford to treat the emerging threat to change from the senate with kids’ gloves. But now that he has been forced to eat the humble pie, he and his handlers will have to go back to the drawing board to deal with what promises to be a grueling duel of political and psychological stamina.
Despite the rearguard rallying of reactionary forces, the momentum, the balance of moral power and punitive initiatives still reside with President Buhari and the forces of change. Change is not always accompanied by a violent discontinuity with the past but by a slow almost imperceptible shift of attitude and perception; a gradual awakening of conscience and consciousness as impossible contradictions congregate and aggregate and  as they are refined and finessed out leading to their subsequent degrading or sublation as the case may be.
Once again, Nigeria is roiling in acute and tormenting political contradictions in all their absorbing over determination. In modern philosophical parlance, an over determined totality is a situation in which structured contradictions refuse to obey the simple Hegelian cause and effect resolution. It is a situation in which so many contradictions jostle for ascendancy at the same time leading to a riotous congregation of multiple causes and multiple effects all tending towards mutual cancelation or the mutual ruination which presages a new order.
After the Jonathan debacle and the ruinous sixteen years of PDP misrule, it is obvious that Nigeria cannot go back to the old order. But given the stalemate in the senate, the gradual disintegration of the regional caucuses of the ascendant party and the absence of an overriding pan-Nigerian ethos to rein in centrifugal forces, it is obvious that for now the forces of change also lack the ideological wherewithal, the critical mass capacity and the acute mental endowment to inaugurate a new order.
Despite the much vaunted political sophistication of the Yoruba political elite, it is a recurring decimal of their history and Nigeria’s history that after every successful mobilization for a federal cause, the wheels always come unstuck as rebellions over largesse and who gets what erupt against the ascendant central authority.
Dissidents and political dissenters revolting against what they consider insensitive and unfeeling leadership make a pitch for the federal umbrella. From the impregnable fortress, they begin to cock a snook at the political machine that threw them up. As it was in 1993 and 1999, so it is beginning to feel in 2015. In an improper federation, there must be something about federal largesse which makes it such a potent political poison for Yoruba elite.
This is the grey zone of political liminality in which we have found ourselves and many things can go wrong from here. It will be a dire tragedy for Nigeria if the nascent forces of change unleashed by the last presidential elections are summarily liquidated by forces of reaction preying upon so many national contradictions and the inability or unwillingness of the president to see the total picture of a fractured and fragmented polity.
While there is no doubting the towering moral authority and ethical luminosity that the retired general from Daura has brought to the Nigerian presidency, there is also no doubt that unless this solitary messianism is harnessed to a grand visionary architecture, an overarching construct of a modern multi-national nation bristling with mutually incompatible nationalities and their historic idiosyncrasies, all may yet come to naught.
For example in more homogeneous and organic nations, Buhari’s zero tolerance for corruption and the current national and international outing and ritual humiliation of those who have burglarized the national Exchequer ought to have driven the fear of the Lord into a grateful populace. In South Korea and other oriental countries with a national culture of shame, the mere allegations of sleaze are often enough to make a politician to commit suicide. In Nigeria, the manifestly corrupt stonewall and stall the judicial process while getting their ethnic cohorts to bring down the roof with the cries of witch hunting.
Nobody has ever told us what is wrong with hunting down witches in the first instance. But in an ethnically, religiously and regionally fissured polity, one person’s witch is another person’s economic wizard and inquiries may turn into inquisitions. Once again, we are faced with the incompatibility of habitus of Nigerian nationalities and the fact that as currently constituted, Nigeria is made up of diverse people in different stages of political development and widely divergent modes of economic, political and spiritual production.
It is like being trapped in a misarticulated lorry with wheels going in different directions. In the millennial friction and grinding immobility, everybody hurts including those who want to go forward, those who want to go backward, those who want to lurch sideway and those who want to remain rooted on the same spot.
This is why Nigeria at this particular conjuncture resembles an open-ended historical fiction requiring the services of an exceptionally endowed power-artist to move it forward. While General Buhari’s drive to sanitize the polity and rid the nation of corruption is a national crusade that must be pursued, he ought to be reminded that national sanitization must not and cannot be an end in itself but an integral part of national rebirth and redemption.
Suffering from the unitarist illusion that the whole nation can be whipped into conforming uniformity and homogenized sanctity all at once, the retired general does not seem to have spared a thought for the architectural fault lines which would make this simply impossible.  Neither have his addresses to the nation, miserable and laconic at best, shown that he understands the power of the spoken word to lift a battered people out of their emotional doldrums.
Going forward, it is going to be a tough act indeed. While the forces of reaction try to bring him to heel and weaken his moral resolve, the president must avoid acts which bring him to direct collision and confrontation with the core constituency which holds the ace for rapid modernization of the country and the strategic scaffolding of the change project itself.
It is also important at this critical point for this constituency to come to terms with the grim reality that given the relentless fanning and whipping up of ethnic hysteria in its backyard by those who lost out in the last election, its own survival depends on the survival of the Buhari administration no matter how fabulous and strange things may become. Political commonsense demands sober introspection and the awareness of human limitations in these perilous times.
ref:  http://thenationonlineng.net/the-strangeness-of-democratic-change/