The Long Restitution, By Tatalo Alamu

I was at his funeral. It was a dark sombre mid-afternoon. That was forty years ago. Together with my friend and big brother, Professor Abayomi Durotoye, we had journeyed very early from Ife and looped off just before Ifon towards the rolling and picturesque Akoko Edo hills before descending on Etsakoland and Auchi.  From the outskirts, we took another detour on the dusty road that led to Ugbekpe-Ekperi, Dele Giwa’s village, before it terminated at Agenebode.

If a community can be described as heart-broken, it was this sleepy, somnolent village in the middle of nowhere. The grief was palpable and could be felt everywhere. The people were mourning their most famous son and hero. It was not the cloth-tearing, sky-punching type of bereavement enacted as public spectacle. Perhaps that had come earlier while the wound was very fresh. As the arrival of the crowd from Lagos began to compound the local demographics, the mourning took on a  colourfully frantic note. Even the sobbing assumed a sociological hue. But as Dele Giwa’s grotesquely dismembered body was being committed to mother earth amidst some gunshots, local grief reasserted itself. The demand for redress and reparation rent the air. The fiery and fierce-looking hunters assured that very shortly, those who committed the dastardly crime would surely be apprehended.

That would be the day. It is forty years and still counting and waiting for the day that justice would be served and judgment delivered. Many, including Madam Elekia, the mother of the deceased, had died waiting. The trail has gone cold. It may look as if evil people have triumphed in this land. But that is not so. We need to distinguish between mob and summary justice, which is instant and almost spontaneous; and restitution which is a longer period of healing and radical restoration. It does not necessarily mean apprehending the culprits. But it means putting in place certain measures that will prevent them from profiting from their crime while leaving the forces of inevitable progress and gradual enlightenment to see to the rest.

This is how history unfolds, in deliberately calibrated cadences and painfully calculated strides. If we look back, we can actually permit ourselves a miserly smile. Those who thought that by silencing Dele Giwa in such a novel and spectacular manner they could impose a culture of silence and medieval servitude on this vibrant and restlessly pulsating nation have failed woefully as the despotic project blew up in their face leaving them dazed and shell-shocked like victims of a powerful bomb. None of them ever advanced their professional careers beyond that point. Some of them have gone to their graves unsung, unmourn and uncelebrated. The few who remain with us are living out the twilight of their  existence as human fiascos. Meanwhile, Dele Giwa has climbed to his apotheosis before our very eyes and beyond the reach of his traducers.

Yet a nation, like any living organism that is not a glutton for punishment, can only take as much without toppling over like an exhausted heavyweight boxer. In a teary farewell after Dele Giwa was brutally dispatched, this writer noted that if care was not taken that image of a virile young man with shattered limbs may well become the enduring metaphor for the nation. And so it has turned out for the better part of four decades with the nation hobbling about aimlessly and in excruciating agony like an elephant with shattered limbs.

Last week as Nigerians marked the fortieth anniversary of Dele Giwa’s assassination, it was a different country and a different Dele Giwa. Dele Giwa has since passed into myth and legend. The starry ascent should be obvious. The Dele Giwa being celebrated by Nigerian youth last week and that is now firmly lodged in the Nigerian political imaginary is different from the Dele Giwa of flesh and blood. That is the way of canonization and beautification. The demographic has changed. The country has grown much younger. Only thirty percent of the surviving populace could remember that day when the devil drank blood. It has been a long restitution.

Consequently, the thirst for vengeance has waned and the passion for retributive justice has cooled considerably replaced by a more measured and tempered appreciation of the vicissitudes of a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural nation in the throes of a long and traumatic transition to political, economic and spiritual modernity. The brutal decimation of a brilliant, charismatic and fearless journalist painstakingly dedicated to his craft like a Swiss watchmaker is an integral part of the national trauma, the cumulative heft of national disasters.

  As we predicted at the time, Dele Giwa has since been joined by others martyrs in the hymnal procession. They include many unquiet ghosts in the cemetery of patriots: Nigeria already has too many ghosts and their living survivors to contend with: from war orphans, coup widows, murdered officers, relics of assassinated politicians, poisoned patriots, state-executed exemplars, etc, etc.  If we are to resurrect all these people we have sacrificed at the shrine of the nation, what an endless cortege of misery and shame!

Many would-be messiahs always have a go at unformed, inchoate and incoherent nations. They include soldiers of fortunes, politicians of misfortunes and a legion of spiritual mercenaries and other mesmerizing mountebanks. In their psychotic delusions, they always believe they are helping the nation to find its feet. This is the unenviable lot of nations in themselves and they leave their claw marks until the constituents are roused as a critical mass out of stupor to become nations for themselves. By a sad coincidence, Patrick Dele Cole, the man who recruited and persuaded Dele Giwa and the whole lot of them to return to Nigeria to contribute their quota to nation-building, also took his exit the same week that the nation was marking the fortieth anniversary of Giwa’s tragic demise. So did Papa Reuben Famuyide Fasoranti, the great Yoruba patriarch and Afenifere leader.    

 Each time one took a solitary walk around the precincts of Brooklyn College in New York where Dele first honed his craft to magical precision, one always wondered what would have happened had Dele Giwa chosen to remain in America. Perhaps he would have become a noted college professor surrounded by doting and admiring students. But that was not the destiny allotted to him.  The exquisitely attired man with the swanky bravura and the telegenic, Omar Sharif good looks would have found the sedate, professorial ambience of even an American classroom too constraining and constricting for his restless spirit.  

 For Dele, it would have been akin to being sectioned. The Ugbekpe-Ekperi man had star quality which could not be hidden for long or kept away from the limelight. It is like asking Herbert Macaulay, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, H.O Davies, the imperious, no-nonsense Bode Thomas and later-day avatars like MKO Abiola why they chose to return home after their studies abroad. Homing is wired into the DNA of the great bird of passage and to home it must return often with perilous consequences. May the soul of Dele Giwa and all the illustrious Nigerians who have been sacrificed at the temple of the postcolonial shrine rest in peace.

Stateless at the second coming of Ebola

The Ebola scourge is here with us again. The genocidal affliction has just staged a dramatic appearance in Nigeria via Uganda. The first time around, it was a feckless and heedless Mr Sawyer, a Liberian diplomat, who brought the biblical plague upon us. By the time the millennial haze lifted, we had lost Stella Ameyo Adadevoh, a distinguished medical practitioner and illustrious scion of the famed Macaulay/Adadevoh clan. Stella went under while trying to save the life of her patients. It was a heroic self-sacrifice worthy of the highest posthumous commendation.

This time around, the identity of the carrier is shrouded in mystery. But once again and as it happened on the first occasion, the Nigerian authorities have rallied heroically and with amazing professional proficiency. While closely monitoring suspects, they have put a few people on a travel ban. We commend the brave efforts of all the coordinating officials. This is the difference between a functioning state whatever its frailties and a defunct colonial anomaly. Ebola, AIDS, Covid-19 are grouped with other viral afflictions as epidemics of human derelictions.

  But we venture to state that the greatest plagues devastating and decimating contemporary Africa and its postcolonial nations are epidemics of state dereliction, that is circumstances in which the postcolonial state is functionally deceased or has ceased to function as a viable society-protecting entity. In several African countries, civil wars, the scourge of terrorism, the pandemic of hunger and related insecurities have combined to render the states technically passé .

This is not a laughing matter or a mere talking shop. When a plague like ebola descends on a state that is already hobbled by terminal infirmities, the result is always an apocalyptic evisceration in which even animals feel sorry for humanity. This is the current situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an unfortunate country that has not known any real peace since the assassination of its founding president, Patrice Lumumba, some sixty five years ago.

Ever since, the stricken country has lived up to the billing of Joseph Conrad’s heart of darkness, an apocalyptic cave of monstrous human sufferings lurching from one evil ruler to another. When a chief from the Ituri Province in the heartland of the nation was asked by a European adventurer about his companion who had gone missing while surveying the district and why the crocodiles upstream appeared to be so robust and particularly well-fed, the old crank responded that the crocodiles had developed a rogue appetite for human flesh because different armies fed them with captured soldiers thrown in live for sheer pleasure. End of search.

A few months back in this column, we had speculated that if the beleaguered country, amidst current turmoil and unrest, were to suffer another round of Ebola, the situation would be quite dire in its unimaginable catastrophe. Now, it has happened and the old Congo is roiling in impossible human suffering. To put things in stark perspective, Joseph Kabila, the former ruler, announced this past week that he is teaming up with the M23 rebels. It is not inconceivable that in the coming weeks Kabila would declare war on the same country that he had ruled for fifteen whole years after the assassination of his father. Kabila, who has a death sentence hanging over his head for earlier infractions, is currently holed up in the rebel enclave of Goma which has all the semblances of an independent breakaway state.

   The immense human suffering, the toll of human miseries, the epic immiseration and forlorn dehumanization do not seem to matter to these people. It is a question of power. The human entities do not seem to matter very much either. They are just expendable ciphers fit only to be fed to eager crocodiles. When in 1996, the CNN beamed a photo of the young Joseph Kabila brandishing an assault rifle after the brilliantly executed capture of Kisangani from the moribund army of Joseph Mobutu, by then a cancer-ravaged monstrosity who had to be helped to his feet on a frigate by the elderly but obviously nonplussed Nelson Mandela, many thought that the historic suffering of the Congolese people was coming to an end. Alas, forty years and three despots after, it has been a case of the more things change the more they remain the same. Tropical Africa is yet to get fully into the stride of colonial recovery not to talk of postcolonial recuperation. Anybody thinking otherwise is in for a massive shock.

And now from shifting cultivation to cross pollination

A few years back while observing the clattering of teeth, the intense mastication, the ravenous feeding habits and the tendency to political nomadism among Nigeria’s political species, this column came to the conclusion that what was going on in the political arboretum was the human variety of shifting cultivation. In Plant Science, shifting cultivation occurs when a plot is vacated after intense cultivation to allow the nutrients to be replenished by nature. Since all humans are political animals, Nigerian politicians jump from one political party to another after the food is exhausted without waiting for their just deserts. Cake and caramel are not the food of monkeys, as they say in this part of the globe. Just look at the fate of the PDP, the former biggest party in Africa, which has now been farmed by the famished lot into a state of stupor and exhaustion.

   But now it does seem that a great political scientist has come up with a humane and novel method of addressing the problem of pedological leprosy, apology to Professor Monkhouse, the great geographer. Why not just look for an Alpha plant to pollinate the plants? With that the plants and the place-men can remain in place to put finishing touches and engineer momentous destabilization while stem engineering appears to be taking place. Everything is done in the open and without cover of darkness. No wuruwuru and no magomago as Humphrey Nwosu will put things. All hail the greatest political engineer of our time.