The English sent up a glad shout and came surging down in strong force to take her, and then for a few minutes the might of both adversaries was concentrated upon that spot.
Over her and above her, English and French fought with desperation--for she stood for France, indeed she was France to both sides--whichever won her won France, and could keep it forever. Right there in that small spot, and in ten minutes by the clock, the fate of France, for all time, was to be decided, and was decided.
---Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Chapter 22.
Two nights ago Nigeria's Green Eagles (they will not be Super in my book until they win something), recorded probably the most fearsome result by an African football team in almost seven years. They beat the French National team in France.
If anyone knows the phone number of an assassin, can the person kindly forward it to me? I need to have Obafemi Martins, Joseph Yobo and Yakubu Aiyegbeni taken out because I fear that if they return to the squad, our lily livered team manager would slot them right back into the team despite the fact that Joseph Akpala, Dele Adeleye and Ikechukwu Uche have proven so evidently better at those positions. I am very pleased with the result of the game, but there was something that displeased me terribly, and that was the coverage.
You see, during last week's Champions League final, Lagos was brought to a standstill as every man who had half a brain stopped what he was doing to watch the game, and there was of course no shortage of television stations for him to satisfy his pleasure.
To my limited knowledge, only the Nigeria Television Authority did not cover that match, just about every other station aired it live. Then the Friday after, and two nights ago, the Eagles took to the field, and were it not for the good graces of AIT, we would not have even known that such a game was happening. That is worse than pathetic.
Back when I was a lot younger, a Nigeria game would have been covered for days ahead of time by a deluge of pre-game analysis (RIP Ernest Okonkwo), build up and anticipation all orchestrated by the NTA. Then for days afterwards (and considering this result) we would have been inundated with analysis and post match crowing. Everyone would flock to the call of the flag. I remember distinctly how things were on the day after the 'Miracle of Damman'. I also remember that night when we beat Brazil thirteen years ago...
When the British came to the area that eventually became known as Nigeria, they found broadly two religious groupings. In the area that lay to the North of the two great rivers, the dominant religion was Islam as spread by Othman dan Fodio's jihad five decades earlier.
To the South the dominant form of worship was largely ancestor worship, and worship of the elements around the peoples who occupied those areas, a form of worship that the British called 'paganism' or as we became more politically correct, 'animism'.
Converting the adherents of animism to the British religion of Christianity was a walk in the park for the missionaries who accompanied the administrators, but converting the adherents of Islam to Christianity proved impossible.
It was a similar experience that the Arab traders five centuries before had experienced all over the Sahara region. In places like Songhai and the Berber held lands, the Arabs encountered almost no resistance to their religion, but in Ethiopia they never quite managed to make the already Christian population to change. The question becomes why?
Like Christianity, Islam has a focal point. In Christendom the focal point is Jesus, in Islam it is Mohammed. Pagan religions do not, and that is why in the opinion of this writer it was nigh impossible first for the Arabs to convert the Coptic Christian Ethiopians, then for the British to convert the Muslim Northern Nigerians. Both sets of people had a rallying point around which to gather and if necessary die.
In the Battle of Paris that Sieur Louis de Conte described in the opening quote of this article, the English realised the iconic value that Joan of Arc held for the French, and the French fighters realised that as well. You see, if the English had captured Joan at that point in time (for the records they did get at her eventually), then Charles VII (already a weak King) would have fled from the country, the Treaty of Troyes by which the English sought to impose their rule on France after the Battle of Agincourt would have held good, and France, to all intents and purposes already English property, would have become, without further dispute, an English province, and would probably have remained so until this day.
Human beings by our very nature are always in need of something, or someone to rally around. For the Christians it is Jesus, for the Muslims it is Mohammed, for the French back in 1429, it was Joan of Arc. For Nigerians in 2009, it is Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United!
The followership that these English teams get in Nigeria is nothing less than stunning, but it is perfectly understandable given the lack of leadership that the country itself has. Given the right leaders, Nigeria and Nigerians will line up in order. This theory was played out in Abuja over the lifespan of the El-Rufai leadership. Suddenly people became conscious of their environment, and (at the very least on the surface) a part of Nigeria became sane. That was because the leadership was doing what it had to do, when it had to do it, and naturally the followership responded.
The kind of leadership Nigeria needs to make some real progress is a morally upright and strong leadership. There is no human being without the odd skeleton in his closet, so let us not waste time asking for the impossible, when I say morally upright, I mean someone who is prepared to lead by example, a good example. At the moment the man at the top doesn't appear to have too many skeletons in his closet, but he isn't strong. We need both.
There has been the argument that we might actually need a dictator after all as this democracy thing is proving much too costly and quite the unmanageable monster. A friend of mine believes this misquoted history (he was actually quoting from the movie The Dark Knight): 'when the enemy was at the gate the Romans suspended democracy and appointed a strong man to lead them through the time of crisis'. People tend to forget recent history so easily, so let me tell you a quick story...
In their news bulletin of 0400 hours on the morning of 8 June 1998, the BBC World Service announced that a man had died. By 1000 hours on that same day, millions of Nigerians had heard that announcement, but went about their daily chores like nothing had happened.
Then in their 1600 news bulletin, Radio Nigeria confirmed what the BBC had announced 12 hours earlier, and when we all knew it to be true, the entire country (save the man's family and his acolytes) broke out in spontaneous jubilation.
I was a wide eyed first year university student then, and I remember all the details of the impromptu party that was thrown in the Hall 1 car park, the speeches made by student leaders, the run from Hall 1, round Ekosodin and on to the UNIBEN Main Gate where another party occurred.
People tend to miss the significance of the 12-hour gap between the first announcement of the death, and the outpouring of emotion. Abacha's grip on Nigeria was so total that no one dared to celebrate publicly lest he suddenly woke up from the dead and arrested them all. Is that what we want to go back to?
In ancient Rome, the people didn't suspend their democracy when there was crisis. No, they voted tribunes and/or consuls to lead them through the crises, and those men were expected to step down as soon as the crisis was over.
Julius Caesar to all intents and purposes seized power when he crossed the Rubicon, and the final effect of it all was that Roman democracy died for the next 1500 years. Nigeria doesn't need a dictator.
According to the dictionary, an icon can be defined as:
1. a picture, image, or other representation.
2. Eastern Church. a representation of some sacred personage, as Christ or a saint or angel, painted usually on a wood surface and venerated itself as sacred.
3. a sign or representation that stands for its object by virtue of a resemblance or analogy to it.
4. Computers. a picture or symbol that appears on a monitor and is used to represent a command, as a file drawer to represent filing.
5. Semiotics. a sign or representation that stands for its object by virtue of a resemblance or analogy to it.
The third meaning is significant as far as I am concerned because that is what Nigeria needs. We need someone that the entire country can look up to, a man who is above all moral reproach within our context of false morality.
A man who is focused and has a very strong idea of where he is headed to, and more importantly, how to get there. A man who would not back down in the face of the numerous forces that are at play in the Nigerian political space.
A man who knows that you don't shove a plan up people's arses in order to accommodate their whims, but rather make people bend to accommodate the plan. A man who knows that he is Nigerian before he is Igbo, Hausa or Yoruba. What Nigeria needs is an icon to fly the flag.
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