The Rise and Rise of Antipolitics, By Tatalo Alamu

Blessed are those who volunteer to direct the affairs of their society and shape their values for they shall inherit the earth. It has been well-established that politics or statecraft is about the noblest and most elevating of the human professions. It takes a certain nobility of purpose to enlist in the perpetual quest for a more orderly and better organized society. Men and women have always perished in the quest to translate their visionary dream of a better and more equitable world into actual reality. In certain periods of strife and commotion, this quest often carries with it the emblem of voluntary suicide, a deliberate self-sacrifice.

It is akin to offering your bare head for the cracking of the coconut of societal redemption. According to a Yoruba proverb, anybody on whose head coconut is broken will not partake in the eating of coconut. Yet like perpetual questers some ethnicities in Nigeria , particularly the Yoruba people, perpetually offer their head to be smashed in the Nigerian coliseum. It is akin to cultivating a cult of romantic suicide. Perhaps it is a way of propitiating for some past collective misdeeds. Just think of Awo putting in hours of self-imposed hard labour in the loneliness of his study. The thought of prison must not lead to the imprisonment of thought. Other questers among his ethnic compatriots, particularly later day gladiators such as MKO Abiola, James Ajibola Idowu Ige and now Bola Ahmed Tinubu must have faced down grave redoubts of doubts and despair as potential liquidators, imagined and real, swarm all over them in the dead of the night.  But the quest cannot and must not be abandoned.

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, with sure death or humiliating capture starring him in the face after his forces were overwhelmed in the Battle of Philippi, Marcus Junius Brutus, perhaps the most honourable and noble of the plotters against the Roman Emperor, lamented to Volumnius, his loyal friend and faithful companion. “Thou seest the enemy has beaten us to the pit: it is more worthy to leap in ourselves, than tarry till they push us”. Thus ended the life of one of the greatest statesmen thrown up by the fabled Roman Empire.

  But it is also the case that in normless and anarchic societies yet to evolve into an ordered and well-regulated polity, no matter their pretensions to a civilized order, people are lured into politics by the sheer allure of vast riches, spectacular wealth and the fame and notoriety that come with it. The psyche has not progressed beyond the psychology of the hunter-gatherer phase of human existence and society itself has not experienced a character-remolding upheaval of catastrophic proportions and humanity is stranded at the infancy of evolution.

 In such societies, exceptional individuals, groups, guilds, castes and ethnicities move to make hay and to corner the riches of the societies. The state is collateral damage, viewed as an alien, hostile entity to be captured at will and subordinated to the will of the new law-givers and remolded in their image. This is not the epoch of primitive accumulation as it is often benignly described by many historians with the romantic hope that the surfeit of unwarranted riches will give way to a better regulated race for wealth.  It is the epoch of accumulated primitivities and barbarities in which civilization is sorely tested by a relapse into compulsory cannibalism in all its possible dimensions.

   This is when antipolitics comes to the fore. Antipolitics is the negation of everything that is noble and uplifting about politics. To be sure, antipolitics is not the absence of politics but the presence of everything that is impolitic. It is a grim fare and a desecration of everything that is human about humanity. Such a society does not need to be formally at war. It is already embroiled in a war of all against all; an apocalyptic contention which shakes the polity to its foundation and in circumstances in which arms and their bearers assume an ominous centrality: Have gun and will travel.

 As the Osun State gubernatorial election wound its way to a grim finale yesterday, antipolitics and its impolitic co-ordinates are in such dominant position that whoever is declared victor has actually started out as a veritable loser. The reason for this tough paradox is that electoral dominance will be procured at the altar of a total breakdown of elite consensus and damning polarisations among the stakeholders. This is where President Tinubu as the father of the nation and the patriarch of its Yoruba ensemble has his work cut out for him. He has started well by asking the voters to vote freely but wisely.

   Damage limitation and the draining of the poisoned environment are inevitable if the corrosion is not to seep into the national body politic.   In the run up to the election, Osun has been so completely militarized that it felt like a gathering of pan-Yoruba warlords at Igbajo rather than a democratic contest. A serving senator was caught on  viral tape asking his supporters to kill off their opponents. Echoes of vultures and uyenzi (cockroach)? Not to be outdone, the sitting governor, after mangling the name of a rival fellow governor who had come to engineer his dethronement about four times, exploded: What type of a name Is that? This kind of verbal indelicacy and political incontinence is the hallmark of antipolitics and it does veritable violence to the spirit and letter of the constitution. As we put this together, news came in that a nephew of the Director General of the Campaign Organization of one of the major parties was shot dead in Esa Oke.

  Institutional and political memory always fails Osun political elite groups both at home and in the Nigerian diaspora leading them to commit unpardonable and egregious political errors of commission and omissions. Why this is so is a source of profound political mystery. Otherwise, the elite ought to have been conditioned and disciplined by the storied history of their own people. The people are joyous regicides and unflappable freedom fighters who are not amenable to the dictates and directives of command politics. Right from the First Republic the place has always been the epicenter of universal conflagration. It was from here that rebellious traditional aristocrats and subversive royalist apologists engineered the torpedoing of the Action Group submarine with perilous consequences for nation and ethnic group.

   We can even stretch it further to the collapse of the old Oyo Empire. Osun people were the veritable shamans, intellectuals, storm troopers and Praetorian Guards of empire. When the empire finally unraveled, they converged first on places such as Iragberi and Songbe before fanning out towards the ancestral homestead with great consequences. Most of the Aare Ona kakanfo, the famed field marshals of Yoruba pre-colonial warfare, are from the place. Kurunmi, the imperious autocrat, erupted from Oko near Ejigbo fighting and feuding all the way to Ijaye an old Egba community which he overran and then converted to his personal fiefdom before meeting his Waterloo in the hands of Basorun Ogunmola and the redoubtable Ibadan army.Related News

It will be recalled that Ogunmola, like many of the dreaded Ibadan war commanders, were of Osun provenance. In terms of internal embroilments, Oshogbo was founded by some  Ijesha warrior-princes from Ipole while Ede was the domain of a master-archer, a craft which “requires deep mental focus, physical control and patience”. Even then and despite the presence of people like the late Chief Bola Ige and many others in their midst, the Ijesha people never voted en mass for the Action Group until Chief Obafemi Awolowo discovered the magic wand at the onset of the Second Republic through substantial elite-pacting. This was how Ebenezer Babatope, a rising Ijesha political juggernaut at that point in time, became the Director of Organization of the UPN.

 What this shows is that contrary to their reputation for stubbornness and mulish intransigence, Osun people can also file behind a unified cause and a pan-Yoruba leadership once they are convinced about the justness of the cause and the immanent integrity of those leading it. This was what subsisted throughout the Second Republic, and through the Babangida years of the locust, the annulment of the freest and fairest election in the history of the nation, Abacha’s despotic blitz and up till the advent of the Fourth Republic. Under the undisputed leadership of Chief Bola Ige, the people bought substantially into the struggle against military dictatorship and filed solidly behind the victors in 1999 as the Fourth Republic got underway. Such was the Yoruba consensus and rock-solid unanimity against military rule and its apostles that it was said that if the NADECO leaders decided to field a goat anywhere in the old west, such a goat would have romped home to resounding victory.

  But nothing lasts forever, particularly in the old west. By 2001, the wheels had begun to come off the moving train once again. The old demons of bitter divisions within Yoruba leadership began rearing their head again. This is how it has always been after a major victory secured by blood, sweat and tears. The people always seem to manage defeat and political setback better than victory. Thereafter and with consummate brinkmanship, they begin to live dangerously again. Bola Ige escaped being expelled from the group by the whiskers and through the gnome-like wisdom and sagacity of Abraham Adesanya. But he was not so lucky with his more militant pursuers and armed interlocutors. He was tragically assassinated in December 2001. His death upended his ambition and publicly stated wish to return to his home base to reinvigorate and reorganize his party. In retrospect and given subsequent developments, it turned out to be a sharp suicide note.

   The elimination of Bola Ige achieved what it was meant to achieve. It drove a final nail into the coffin of Yoruba post-military consensus and subsisting political unanimity. It brought about a  fundamental disruption of political etiquette so severe that it has led  to the triumph of antipolitics, a relapse into the political state of nature where savagery is the norm and hirsute wild men rule the roost chanting catch ‘am, kill ‘am as they hunt down their opponents. As it can be expected, Osun State has been badly hit by the ensuing political disorder. At least three of the governors in this post-military dispensation have left office in less than salubrious circumstances.

   Those who claim to have won the election in 2003 and 2007 were eventually driven out by the courts. The odds against an elite pact are lengthening. Some traditional rulers have jumped into the fray, openly canvassing. The people are in open revolt against accustomed leadership irrespective of party banners. It will be a tragic error of judgment to allow the apoplectic Yoruba mob, seething with incandescent rage, to take over proceedings. Only astute and sterling federal statesmanship and Nigeria’s legendary run of good luck can prevent an apocalyptic meltdown.

  Let us in ending now look once again at the road not taken. In September 2001, yours sincerely delivered a lecture to commemorate the eighty fifth anniversary of the famed Yoruba Tennis Club in Lagos. The lecture was attended by the crème de la crème of the Yoruba political, technocratic and economic aristocracy. Titled, The Politics of Antipolitics, it was meant to draw attention to emerging trends in the Fourth Republic under General Olusegun Obasanjo which went against the grain of genuine and authentic politics as the quest for the amelioration of the human condition. The lecture came against the backdrop of the trial of Ganiyu Adams, the leader of the more militant faction of the OPC, for terrorism and anti-state activities.

  Regarded at that point in time as an authentic hero of the Yoruba struggle against an oppressive and stultifying Nigerian state, the trial of Adams opened up a central contradiction for the post-military polity. While the state pressed on with the terrorist charge, the Yoruba people also laid a siege on the court demanding immediate cessation of the trial and the release of their son. As they surged and milled round the court premises, the atmosphere became very charged and volatile. Needless to add that the trial was quietly terminated.

   Unfortunately for the nation, the virus of antipolitics had already taken firm roots in the polity. At that point in time, the murder of Chief Bola Ige was still a few months away, the deliberate emasculation of opposition parties, the evisceration of people perceived to be political opponents, the abrogation of the electorate, the electoral heists of 2003 and 2007 consequent upon this and the Third Term gambit and all the fraudulent shenanigans associated with this were still germinating in the playbook. As a result, the entire country now appears to be overrun by the toxicity of antipolitics which bodes very ill for the development of a viable political culture in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation judging by the preliminary skirmishes we have witnessed in Osun.  In General Buhari, we had the ultimate manifestation of antipolitics, a man whose disdain and distrust of the formal protocols of consensual politics almost tipped the nation over the cliff. The danger in all this is that it will lead to further revulsion with politics and an active hatred for politicians which will make the people vulnerable to charlatans and other chancers.

   Having demonstrated unusual bravery in facing down political opponents who tragically and erroneously believe that Nigeria belongs to them,  and having survived the antics of internet scoundrels and their psychological hooliganism, Bola Tinubu, in the coming months, should switch to the consensual mode of politics in all its statesmanlike rectitude. This will enable him to reach out to former allies who have become formidable adversaries and also allow all of us, including those whose feeding bottle has been snatched away by hostile economic forces and those perpetually throwing tantrums like toddlers, to sit down in a constructive manner to reimagine a Nigeria rid of economic sabotage and feudal overreach. It is only then that we can be sure that our avatars did not die a needless death.