LITTLE ENDS: The good news from Kaduna

The Guardian on Sunday June 6, 2009 published a report that should gladden the heart of every Nigerian. Governor Namadi Sambo of Kaduna state got a taste of the anger and discontent of the Nigerian street when youthful protesters ambushed his convoy.

According to the newspaper: “Hundreds of irate youths allegedly angry over developments in the council laid an ambush against the governor and his team. The governor was in the area to commission projects executed by his administration and the council but the angry youths, bearing fresh leaves and placards and singing offensive songs took over the route and attempted to stop the ceremony.”

The protest was sparked by the usual litany of indignity, and hopelessness foisted on Nigerians Those who have remained completely but justifiably befuddled - including Wole Soyinka - by the seemingly inexhaustible endurance of Nigerians should be the first to read the quit notice that this long-suffering people have begun to serve on the Philistines in the ruling elite. From the grandmothers of Ekiti to the youths of Kaduna, the message is constant, even if we know that the rulers of Nigeria are too intellectually impecunious to get it.

I am happy that the Kaduna protesters took out their anger on the governor’s convoy. The convoy is, indeed, Nigeria’s first tragedy. In a context of total declaration of war on the social contract by visionless rulers, the convoy represents nothing but visual and symbolic violence done to the psyche of the people.

Remember that every single car - sorry, bullet-proof SUV with tainted windows- in that long convoy is most probably the fruit of over-inflated contracts. Remember that some - or most - of those vehicles will disappear with the incumbent when he leaves office. Remember the guns of their overzealous security aides.

Remember the swagger and the arrogance of the hundreds of aides, officials, and assistants who are described as the big man’s “entourage” but whose singular responsibility is to shield their non-performing and corrupt principal from the people. Finally, remember that, courtesy of NEXT, we now know that President Yar’Adua even owns a convoy of seventeen ambulances! In essence, a patina of oppression comes naturally with the convoy and sirens of the Nigerian official.

It symbolises the personalisation, arrogance, and mystification of power. I have encountered jejune arguments that government officials in civilized climes also use convoys. Such silly comparisons deserve no comment.

As far as I’m concerned, no Nigerian (s)elected office holder deserves a convoy and that is part of the message of the angry youths in Kaduna.

The Emir of Zaria and the Governor were reported to have offered the usual constipated admonishments that Nigeria’s failed rulers produce robotically from a template in such circumstances.

‘Eschew violence!’ ‘Be law-abiding!’ ‘We shall bring you the dividends of democracy!’ Lost on both members of the northern elite is an interesting phenomenon. The youths stoning the governor’s convoy come from the ‘army’ of hungry youths that their class brainwashes and keeps in poverty, ready for ‘deployment’ to kill and maim Christian infidels, burn churches, and chop off a few Igbo heads from time to time. One such youth heckled the governor of Taraba state last year and is still in jail as I write. The northern political elite needs to pick up any good dictionary of English expressions.

They should look up the part that mentions something about the chicken coming home to roost.

This brings me to the importance of meaning and the easy and unbelievable concessions that we, the people, make to the oppressor. I harp frequently on this theme because meaning matters. The successful colonisation of meaning by our rulers partially explains why we rationalise everything they do. The media has played a sordid role in the loss of meaning to our rulers. I have referred to the Kaduna actors as “protesters” and that is deliberate.

The Guardian was not that generous. That newspaper called them “irate youths”, “mob”, and other foolish words their reporters lifted directly from the repertoire of the Nigerian ruling class. No Nigerian newspaper is immune to this tendency of sheepish deployment of official vocabulary in their analyses of social phenomena.

Even some of their most sympathetic reports on the Niger Delta betray this problem. Leadership’s publisher, Sam Nda Isaiah, has been writing silly columns on the Niger Delta that could have been dictated by Olusegun Adeniyi. As far as meaning is concerned, nothing is more dangerous than an uncritical media that employs the vocabulary of the ruling class.