The beer hall putsch revisited

(A German allegory for Deacon Femi Adesina)

Oh dear, oh dear, it appears the heat in the presidential kitchen may be getting to our boy and former student, Deacon Femi Adesina.  Yours sincerely has not sighted Femi in the six years since he assumed office, but one can reasonably surmise that he is in excellent spirit and fine fettle. Unlike the delightfully roguish Garba Shehu who relishes the role of offensive playmaker for an embattled presidency and its numerous foes, Femi is a stalwart of defence with occasional forays into enemy territory.

But we live in strange and confusing times where actual reality is more colourful and spectacularly surreal than the most outlandish fiction. Current infamy often erases past distinction. Sometimes there are eerie parallels between two totally different historical epochs which give one an unnerving feeling of Déjà vu. Often, two totally dissimilar historical figures end up sharing the same fate even as thunder strikes in the same place twice.

No one can separate what is real from what is demonically imagined anymore. Take for example, the new phenomenon of fake news. If all the energy and brilliance expended on dis-imagining the nation can be used to re-imagine it!!! But the purveyors of fake news tell you that it is a legitimate assault on illegitimate reality. Tyranny is a distortion of reality. Distorted reality demands and deserves further distortions of reality until everybody comes to their senses.

Last week in what appeared to be a last-ditch attempt to fend off hostile interlocutors, the presidential spokesperson alerted the nation to a plot by disgruntled religious and political leaders to convoke an illegal confab to overthrow his principal. They were trying to achieve what they could not achieve through the ballot box. The statement bears quoting at length:

“Championed by some disgruntled religious and past political leaders, the intention is to eventually throw the country into a tailspin, which would compel a forceful and undemocratic change of leadership. Further unimpeachable evidence shows that these disruptive elements are now recruiting the leadership of some ethnic groups and politicians round the country, with the intention of convening some sort of conference, where a vote of no confidence would be passed on the President thus throwing the land into further turmoil”.

The internal tensions and semantic stress in this statement, not to talk of its logical inconsistency, is a testament to political disorientation. Femi should read his own statement all over again. First, eventuality is not the same thing as immediate actuality. Second, “some sort of conference” is not the same thing as a real conference.

In any case, since when has an illegal confab obviously without the blessing of either the military or the national assembly become the preferred route to terminate an obviously beleaguered regime? What will be the effect of such putative vote of no confidence on the polity except to add to the growing concerns about the state of the nation?

Femi is far too accomplished to be caught at this level of pepper soup joint punditry and  beer parlour blathers. If it is a prelude to a clampdown on the perceived enemies of the government as a result of increasing popular hostility, the government does not need such convoluted tales as this. It has after all taken some extremely tough measures in the past without resorting to diabolic stunts.

Yet as we have hinted above, there is something so strange and unnerving about this whole episode and how it recalls the original Beer Hall Putsch that convinces us that there may be a major political allegory unfolding. There is often a deeper lesson to be learnt beyond the surface trivialities and superficiality of a statement particularly by those who serve as transmitters of the message.

The Germans are known to be very stern and serious-minded people with a tendency to take themselves too seriously often leading to perceptions of humourless arrogance. It is an irony of their modern history that such a significant development should come to be known as The Beer Hall Putsch. But the Germans loved their beer and their numerous beer halls. It was in one of these that fate conjoined Adolf Hitler and his adopted country.

Adolf Hitler was born an Austrian, a German-speaking nation of the same genetic stock. He had been completely down on his luck. Twenty four in 1923, he could not be said to have done anything with himself apart from being invalided out of the First World War as a lowly corporal. It was a sore and sensitive point for him and whenever the occasion suited Winston Churchill, a master of psychological siege, he would refer to Hitler as Corporal Schicklgruber, his old Austrian name and military rank.

After the war, Hitler joined the security force as a police spy. His assignment was to spy and report on the German Workers’ Party. But he became completely captivated by its message which was a quaint admixture of fierce, implacable nationalism and savage denunciation of capitalism. Gaining rapid acceptance and ascendancy as a result of his oratorical skills and organizational ability, Hitler persuaded the party to change its name to National Socialist Party. Thus was born the NAZI moniker.

The Germany in which all this was taking place was not any better than Adolf Hitler, the former Austrian vagrant. For country and adopted citizen, it was a rendezvous of two gifted but frustrated desperadoes. Germany was also completely down on its military, political and economic luck. Convulsed by revolutionary concussions, it had earlier abolished its monarchical institution and a king who was widely believed to be suffering from dementia and hereditary mental incapacity.

But this was not enough to reverse its desperate luck on the military and economic fronts. Battered and pounded into submission by Russian and French artillery, Germany succumbed to a humiliating technical knock-out in the hands of the Allied forces. The ensuing Treaty of Versailles marked a new low in the history of the emergent German nation.

The punitive reparations left the economy in ruins, the people shattered and devastated and the national outlook bleak and unpromising. The Weimar Republic was widely reviled and dismissed as an expensive joke. Chafing under the yoke of the new American economic imperialism and political disorder at home, most German people believed that it was a question of time before something gave.

This was the situation on the morning of November, 8th, 1923 when Hitler stormed the Beer Hall with about six hundred armed NAZI volunteers to terminate the Bavarian government hoping that this would trigger a nation-wide uprising that would bring down the hated Weimar Republic. Hitler had secured the support of Ernst Ludendorff, a war hero and arguably the most respected German general of the time. The stern, no-nonsense general duly arrived at the Beer Hall in military frocks.

The whole thing ended in a fiasco as the military police opened fire on the frenzied mob killing about sixteen of them. Hitler fell to the ground with a dislocated shoulder. It was said that General Ludendorff walked through the hail of bullets with a contemptuous swagger as if he was taking an early morning stroll. The truth may be more prosaic. No soldier or military personnel would dare fire on Germany’s most respected living soldier.

Ludendorff was later to dismiss Hitler as a coward for daring to run away vowing never to have anything to do with him again, a promise he kept till the bitter end despite rumours to the contrary. For his pains, Hitler was jailed for five years but later released as a result of his growing popularity and prestige after serving only one year. It was in the enforced seclusion of the prison yard that Hitler found the time to write his famous book, Mein Kampf, translated as My Struggle.

Hitler took to heart the hard lessons of the Beer Hall debacle. He renounced any residual faith in the military path to political glory vowing from that point on to gain power through democratic means and the parliamentary route to political stardom. Military coups are for political amateurs. Thereafter, he commenced a relentless and single-minded assault on Germany’s enfeebled democratic temple culminating in a dizzying rise to the chancellorship in 1933.

The former Austrian corporal had turned the table on the greatest German generals of his generation using them to gain power in a Faustian pact which left no room for mercy or mercy-killing. Once in power, Hitler used the army to deal with his loyal red-shirt colleagues in what is known as “The Night of the Long Knife”. The casualties included Ernst Rohm, the only man known to address the Fuhrer in the familiar “du” expression.

Thereafter, Hitler was to turn on the military itself, systematically brutalising and eventually destroying the high caste German Junker military aristocracy ineluctably leading to another ruinous global war for the German people within a spate of thirty years. For the doughty Germans, it was a spellbinding rollercoaster which ended in utter destruction of the German society.

The saturation bombing by the Americans virtually obliterated many German cities and left the people desolate and disconsolate. If anybody had told the Germans that there was something worse than the Treaty of Versailles, the person would have been shouted down. It can however be argued that the Germans have also made their point in a rather costly and bloody manner, leading to two world wars and much universal trauma for the human species.

It is important that in a multi-nation world, people of diverse cultures must be accorded equal respect and understanding. Similarly, champions of hegemonic supremacy in multi-ethnic and multi-religious nations who subject other factions to serial political humiliation and economic subjugation, flagrant nepotism and unfair discrimination must accept that they are merely stoking the fire of inevitable bloody confrontation.

No one is interested in political scaremongering but it is important for functionaries of the Nigerian state to keep their ears to the ground in order to appreciate the forces that drive political dynamics in the country. In the past three weeks, there have been loud calls for the president’s resignation on the grounds of his perceived inability to function properly and in accordance with the rigours of presidential office in a volatile nation.

There are creeping rumours of senility and dementia. Whatever be the reason, these calls are unprecedented to say the least. Despite their rambunctious nature, Nigerians are generally sensitive to and understanding of crippling ailments.

It must be General Buhari’s past infractions or current insensitivities that must be driving these increasingly strident calls for his resignation. This is what his close advisers ought to look into. How a man who was widely admired if not exactly loved has become an object of public ridicule and scorn ought to bother his aides.

As if this was not enough, there are now open calls for the military to take back the power they relinquished about twenty one years earlier. Luckily, the military authorities have themselves denounced the idea. But the fact that the idea was mooted at all and by respected citizens shows how deep the rot is.

Whatever will be will be. Nothing can reprieve a society fated to a terrible destiny, particularly one captured by stone-deaf feudal predators. Rather than rooting for a violent military intervention, Hitler chose the route of a parliamentary putsch to gain political ascendancy. But a coup is a coup.ADVERTISEMENT

The German society that threw up Hitler, despite its military prowess, was a deeply feudalistic nation riddled by class, caste and racial inequities and led by a hopelessly ineffectual and corrupt breed of politicians. Tragedy was inevitable. It was left to a resentful, hate-filled Austrian to drive the contradictions to their logical conclusions even while under the illusion that he was furthering the glory of his people.

It is an old German allegory for contemporary Nigeria. One is sure that almost three and a half decades after, Femi is still able to distinguish between latent and manifest contents of texts as borrowed by Literary Theory from Freudian psychoanalysis of dreams.