Way back in the 1980s as Mobutu Sese Seko the maximum ruler of Zaire held his vast country in an iron clad, Washington rolled out the red carpet for the old fox anytime he was in town.
Way back in the 1980s as Mobutu Sese Seko the maximum ruler of Zaire held his vast country in an iron clad, Washington rolled out the red carpet for the old fox anytime he was in town.
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Femi my friend, now a grey-bearded professor of political science, was sure that beyond the red carpet and the lavish bash often thrown for the African Big Man, Uncle Sam must be having a big ball behind his back to snigger at his folly. My friend was sure also that the guardians of Uncle Sam’s portals had a code for the ilk of Mobutu and the continent they traded for a bottle of rum; a code only known to the highest echelon in the White House.
I didn’t bother to ask why the ilk of Mobutu and the continent they plundered deserved such elaborate discretion from their principals. But then I have always thought my friend was right. A cold war was raging out there in the 1980s and here was another willing potentate from Africa so ready to trade under klieg lights, why would anyone distract him from trading in peace? Think of it, it would be the height of indiscretion to tell Mobutu Sese Seko he was actually a cad if you were an American President. Back then it didn’t hurt if you had an African Big Man on your side ready to pitch against his own kind if you were a Ronald Reagan fighting Andrei Gromyko or Margaret Thatcher preaching Constructive Engagement and pitching for Botha and Apartheid in South Africa.
I later watched a documentary on the Mobutu long after he eventually succumbed to Laurent Kabila and prostrate cancer. He caught a pitiable sight as held onto the shards of his crumbling regime. Mobutu easily came across in the footages like an emperor without an empire as he pensively paced the lawns of his lavish retreat in Gbadolite. Though devoid of the familiar swaggers in the footages, his trademark loomed large in the neck-muffler, walking-stick and all. The megalomania streak was also still apparent as he waxed audacious on messianic roles, ungrateful subject, and critics that knew nothing about the pains of governing a complex country like Zaire.
I came out of that documentary feeling sorry for Lumumba’s Congo the country Mobutu had serially raped, maimed and rechristened. But I also felt sorry for the greying man at the verge of losing his most favourite toy; the country handed him by the West while he was still scarcely an adolescent. Mobutu deliriously confused rape with favour and the despoliation of his country with an act of great kindness.
I felt a similar pity for our own IBB as I watched him rationalizing the monumental ruin wrought by his governance on Nigeria and the annulment of June 12 1993 elections. Watching the man talk about his so-called achievements you got the vibe that he was totally out of tune with the current realities. As the days go by in this new adventure for power Babangida sounds more like Marshall Mobutu and like one that has been living in a sound-proof silo since he cowardly stepped aside in 1993.
Stripped to bare bones, Babangida-speak often came across as a rambling monologue devoid of a philosophical base in his former life. Now grown rusty with time it has further mutated into babbles and is still devoid of a logical core. Imagine his comments the other day on BBC that the Nigerian youths are incompetent to rule Nigeria and the recent touting of the annulled June 12 1993 elections as a major attainment of his regime.
Normally absolute power breeds a Messianic complex out of which infallibility sprouts. History is replete with characters at various stages of that manifestation. Take Louis XIV, one of the last real Bourbons and a perfect historical exhibit on that symptom. The monarch patented L’état C’est Moi at his apogee of power drunkenness before the guillotine neatly severed monarchy from politics in France in apparent lesson to the Bourbons that power indeed belongs to the people. Adolf Hitler also exhibited a similar symptom as he ranted on the sanctity of his vision amid the ruins of his nation. He reportedly ranted on his own infallibility even as the dreams of his thousand-year German Reich crumbled in his hands. Add those to the muses of Mobutu in Gbadolite at the dusk of his tyranny and you find that correct self-assessment is not in the character of despots.
Babangida’s unremorseful postures on SAP, annulment of June 12 elections and current adventure on power may better be understood within a messianic context. In the circumstance, a life run by blind ambition understanding philosophical niceties on general good may be too demanding. Ravaging poverty sired by ill-digested policies could also come across to the perpetrator as a necessity. Obscene opulence acquired through the undue privileges of office can be misconstrued as a divine right. Huge patrimonies squandered on cyclical transition to nowhere can also be offhandedly explained as a cost of building a better tomorrow even while it you know the man is talking of his own tomorrow and that of his immediate family.
In the Babangida mindset the ruled deserve no explanation from an erstwhile ruler. They have no business inquiring on why he failed so miserably on the promises voluntarily made on the day of his self-imposition and why he is unashamedly routing for a comeback despite the failures. Apparently to IBB power owes no quarter except to itself and power is not compelled to obey logical reasoning.
Presently Nigerians may be powerless to call IBB to account on the action he took yesterday to bring us to this sorry pass but the nation owes itself to keep remembering the mileposts of those years of locust and insist: Never Again. Notwithstanding his suggestions to the contrary, let us not forget the hope we invested on IBB as he rode on our goodwill in the summer of 1985. Let us not forget how he mindlessly squandered the hope. Let us not forget how we waited kept on trusting even as he corrupted our values and kept asking for more time. We must not forget that Babangida in the end he abandoned Nigeria at the gates of hell, far away from the heavens he solemnly promised in 1985.
Now that the Maradona is asking to be let back into the field of play, after a red card, we should remind him that the rules have changed since he stepped aside. Like Mobutu Sese Seko, IBB is entitled to his hallucinating justifications Nigerians we owe it a duty to let the man realize that the joke is on him this time around.
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