The PDP must win the forthcoming gubernatorial election in Anambra. For its own sake and for the sake of the enemies of the Nigerian people who make up the party’s national leadership. If you do not understand my logic, it’s time for you to read Chinua Achebe’s classic 1970s essay, “An Image of Africa”. Google it up and read it. Concentrate on the first part of the essay, where Achebe turns psychoanalyst and evaluates Europe’s dependency on Africa.
Achebe discusses Europe’s perception of Africa as a form of psychological dependency on a certain image of that continent. Europe – read the West – needs Africa as a foil, a primitive, diseased, hungry, and underdeveloped backwater that serves the unique purpose of reminding Europe of her own progress, modernity, and civilization. Africa is that mnemonic instrument that tells a triumphant Europe: you are everything that I am not; you are progression and I am retrogression; you are approbation and I am negation.
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Make the appropriate substitutions and you arrive at pretty much the same Achebean scenario in terms of what Anambra now represents for our fiends in the PDP – a psychological imperative, a need. They need to win Anambra. They must win Anambra. Just as Europe needs Africa to affirm her, the PDP needs Anambra to tell her some things I will analyze later. First, I offer a quick recall of how this psychological need emerged and its poisonous progression within our body politic. As a political entity and, arguably, the most destructive gangrene that Nigeria has ever known, the fundamental philosophy that guides the PDP in Nigeria is not limited to the do-or-die tomfoolery foisted on our political lexicon by Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. Beneath that veneer of irredeemable banditry is an even more cynical strategy which consists in inducing in the people a deleterious habit of national nostalgia for the penultimate outrage.
How did the PDP turn us to a people in a permanent love affair with the penultimate outrage? The answer lies in the historical antecedents of the party and the manner of its emergence as an amalgam of the most recidivist elements in Nigerian humanity. For the purpose of convenience, we shall limit the history of transfers of conservative tendencies and forces - and their vile ideologies - to the NPN and what followed. Fellow public commentator, Wale Adebanwi, has written extensively on how the forces under scrutiny here emerged and evolved before the NPN and I do not wish to rehash his excellent points. They are readily available online.
Through various political permutations and fiendish processes of evolution, some of the worst characters Nigeria’s has ever produced came to assemble in the nightmare that was the Nigerian Peoples’ Party (NPN) in the Second Republic. The same forces – Fela would call them Opposite People - moved almost seamlessly to the National Republican Convention (NRC) in the Babangida dispensation. However, the politics and strategies of the NRC were so vile, their philosophy and programmes for Nigeria so porous and hollow that the NPN became the penultimate outrage that people remembered with some nostalgia – that is in the context of diminished national choices and options. In my village, I still recall people exclaiming: “ even the NPN people were not as terrible as these NRC people”.
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Consistent with this philosophy of making the penultimate outrage attractive to Nigerians, the PDP has now transformed the NRC into a lesser evil that you remember with some nostalgia. The NRC killed less people, stole elections less brazenly, stole less money, and pretended to have an identifiable ideology - no matter how hollow - among so many things that make it better than the PDP. In essence, the cruel hands of fate seem to have condemned us to be a people that must always look back longingly at the tragedies in our past because they are far better than the conundrums of our present. Hence you encounter such statements from the Nigerian: “na wah o. even the NRC better pass this yeye PDP sef.” This is pretty much what a reader wrote to me privately last week.
In essence, the anti-people looters of our collective patrimony who now make up the PDP have adopted this strategy to sedate us and sustain the systematic rape of our polity since 1999. And it has worked. We are always so massively shocked, so overwhelmingly awed and numbed by every new outrage they foist on us that our instinct is to always yearn for the penultimate outrage. I guess it is a psychological feel-good mechanism for a raped, impoverished people who have concluded that they are helpless and powerless. Hence, when they gave us the outrage that was the 2003 presidential election, we longed for and even excused what they did in 1999; the calamity that was the 2007 presidential election saw us longing for and excusing the lesser outrage that 2003 had paled into.
But even this strategy has its limitations, the most serious being the fact that it has no barometer that could help the enemy determine where the fault lines and the snaplines lie. It has no in-built mechanism to determine when the people would snap, when their instinct would stop being wired to a gestural embrace of the penultimate outrage rather than a spontaneous explosion against the latest outrage. It has no way of telling when the people would stop feeling powerless and helpless. For instance, if 150 million people amazingly accept today to be held to ransom by just five scurrilous characters who have ruled us hazily and collectively for a little more than a month – Turai Yar’Adua, Michael Aondoakaa, Tanimu Yakubu, James Ibori, and Abba Ruma – there is no failsafe way for the enemy to tell that the people won’t snap tomorrow. Michael Aondoakaa does not know when he is going to be stoned in Abuja or Lagos by an irate people who have snapped and decided to say: enough!
The enemy is acutely aware of this severe weakness of his preferred strategy. A move they have consequently devised to cope with this weakness is to keep testing the limits while banking on the things that divide the people. Hence, Ekiti was not just the outrage they served us to make us long for the lesser calamities that preceded it, it was also a testing of limits – to see if they could get away with it while banking on the divisive fault lines of our nationhood. And it worked. Thus, to a large extent, we abandoned Ekiti to the PDP, seeing it as an Ekiti/Yoruba issue. In cyber Nigeria, for instance, I watched sadly as folks mocked the efforts of the likes of Mobolaji Aluko, Yinka Odumakin, Femi Falana, and so many other Yoruba intellectuals who howled and howled until their throats ached. Not even the breast-baring Ekiti women who came out to curse the PDP rapists escaped cyber scorn and derision – sometimes from hypermodern Yoruba people who are completely ignorant of the cultural warrants of the women’s action.
In all that we forgot that Ekiti was being used to test the waters for Anambra and was, therefore, connected to our collective national peonage to the PDP oppressor. Ekiti was just the psychological prop that the enemy needed to know that Nigerians are not close to snapping. Ekiti was the torchlight or kerosene lantern the PDP needed to take them to Anambra in the context of our national darkness. Ekiti explains their swagger and confidence going forward to Anambra. And they can see that we are already repeating the same errors of believing that the coming calamity in Anambra is just an Anambra issue. Hence in the ideological-intellectual world of cyber Nigeria, Anambra has been largely abandoned to Okey Ndibe, Joe Igbokwe, Peter Claver Oparah, Daniel Elombah, Rudolf Okonkwo, and a host of other Anambra/Igbo writers – much the same way Ekiti was abandoned to Ekiti/Yoruba writers and intellectuals.
Yet, like Ekiti, Anambra is a state the enemy needs to win in order to reassure himself psychologically that we are not close to snapping as a people. Anambra is the only barometre left for the enemy to conclude that we, the people, are not yet at the end of our tethers. The logic and reasoning that sustain the enemy going forward can be summarized thus: if we can take Ekiti and they didn’t snap, we can take Anambra. If we take Anambra and they don’t snap, then we can take Nigeria in 2011. All we shall then need to do is make the rigging so massive, the theft so daring and brazen in 2011 that they will scuttle back to the psychological comfort zone of yearning for what would by then have become the lesser evil of 2007!
This explains why Anambra has become a psychological necessity for them. This explains Tony Anenih’s name change for the occasion – he says he is now Anene until Anambra is successfully stolen. They need to “win” Anambra, they must “win” Anambra (actually, “capture” is the language they normally use), in order to sustain their belief in our continuous docility – a vital necessity for 2011. Okey Ndibe has written that if Maurice Iwu rigs Anambra, it will be the last election he will rig.
Okey’s statement needs to be qualified. For if Maurice Iwu rigs Anambra successfully in February, he will rig one more election successfully in 2011. It follows therefore that the sort of national hysteria that has developed around Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab needs to be replicated urgently for Anambra now. There needs to be a similar constellation of national energies and attention on Anambra. That is where we need to stop Maurice Iwu and his evil cabal in the PDP before they get us in 2011. We can’t afford to let Maurice Iwu rig Anambra successfully and wait to find out if it is the last election he would rig.
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