The summit of human knowledge is self-discovery through constant self-examination. While some societies are quite adept at meeting the great expectations of their people, others are notorious for breaking the heart of their citizens. Dear readers, what you are about to read was written in 2004. It was in response to the promise by the Americans at the beginning of the century to put human beings on Mars by the year 2030.
Sixteen years later, there is nothing to suggest that the Americans are daunted or fazed by their single-minded scientific resolve to perform the greatest human miracle of all time. Having conquered the world as we know it, there is nothing left for the Americans to prove, except the possibility of humanity conquering extraterrestrial space. Very soon some Americans will land on Mars. Please permit me to quote from the earlier script.
“In some strange ways, we have come to the end of history, and the nation-state paradigm is about to exhaust its possibilities. America has become the ultimate nation. Nothing underscores the nature of America’s total dominance and the reality of its mega-powerdom than the fact that at the last count two former rulers of sovereign nations are its unwilling guests, making nonsense of the very notion of the nation-state and its hallowed apparatuses.
There may be more in the kitty before the end of the decade. Noriega and Saddam Hussein may be former American thugs but they would have learnt to rue the day they cocked a snook at their former masters. The Americans are bored, having dealt with all the challenges to their authority and global supremacy. Like a monstrous super heavy weight boxer who has beaten all challengers black and blue, Uncle Sam now relishes a fight with outer nature itself and its robotized machines.
It is a moot point to argue that the money to be spent on this venture could have lifted all human societies from the abyss of poverty and deepening immiseration. But that is against the logic of history and human nature. Let the dead bury the dead. It is better to stumble forward than to wobble backward. If America courts disaster, it does so on behalf of all humanity, whether as involuntary spectators or as active participants”.
When this was written in 2004, there was no Barack Obama as a presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, not to talk of President Barack Obama. Obama was a junior senator learning the rope with hope and audacity. But since then America has broken a centuries old taboo by electing twice its first president of African American extraction. If the Americans were to elect Hilary Clinton as their first female president in the November election, they would have broken another centuries old taboo.
Why then would the Americans not be in Mars? In one concentrated burst of history, America has broken through seemingly impregnable fortresses of racial prejudice and gender bias, even if at the merely symbolic level. As this column loves to quote, there are decades when nothing happens and there are periods when decades happen. No country can survive without constant self-rejuvenation and ceaseless self-invention. America, for all its manifest faults, its crass materialism and the constant possibility of backsliding, is a classic example of relentless striving towards a more perfect nation.
For those interested in a tale of two nations, the history of Nigeria during this period cannot be more startling in the intriguing paradoxes it throws up. Nigeria has been famously described as a country where the best never happens, but where the worst portents also never occur. Nigeria is a nation of legendary luck. Like a punch-drunk heavy weight boxer, Nigeria may wobble and stumble in the ring, but each time it hits the canvas, its power of recovery has been a tad short of the miraculous.
When what follows was being written in 2004, Nigeria had just managed to survive a badly rigged federal election which returned General Obasanjo to office. The loser was none other than the current President. So egregiously rigged was the election that the usually perceptive Chief Sunday Awoniyi observed with gnomic wisdom that the atmosphere had been so badly fouled, so comprehensively besmirched, that something good must come out of the pervasive electoral rot.
This was followed in 2007 by an even more sensationally rigged election in which the declared winner openly acknowledged his own suspect legitimacy by setting up an electoral reform panel. But what Chief Adeniran Ogunsanya famously described as the National Riggers’ Theatre was yet to act out its full script. The 2011 election was met with such savage reprisal and wanton destruction in the north that for a moment, the continued survival of the nation was called to question.
Yet in 2015, Nigeria managed to achieve a momentous regime change through the ballot box which has never happened in the history of the nation. In the interval, Nigeria has survived a full scale religious insurgency which has put the corporate existence and survival of the country to its stiffest test since the civil war. In fact large swathes of the north east of the country were overrun and occupied by the vicious sect.
But as we are discovering to our peril, elections, however historic, do not resolve some fundamental questioning of the nation. In fact they often exacerbate it. In the glorious aftermath of the 2015 elections, Nigeria has reverted to its default line of endemic crises and conflicts. With the two major parties fracturing before our very eyes in a cesspit of intrigues and treachery, with the judiciary under siege, with the legislature under the spell of delinquency, with the economy in critical straits and with ethnic and regional rancor embroiling the polity, Nigeria has never been more divided and polarized in its entire history.
The national demons are here with us once again. This is the most critical conjuncture in the history of the country. Suddenly, we seem to have arrived at the epoch of zero-party politics or no party formation. It is a sign of revolutionary anomie. Will our legendary luck hold once more?