SECTION 39: Carrying forward

This was another year when we found ourselves constantly doing a double-take, as one baffling event replaced another. It was a year when we tried to make sense of the doings of our rulers, both the ones at home, and the masters of the world.

But as 2009 drew to an end, we were left pondering some matters that we are undoubtedly going to meet - with knobs on - in the New Year. On the world stage, it was a year when it became more convenient to talk about carbon gas emissions in ‘per country' terms, rather than ‘per capita'. That allowed wealthy carbon-belching citizens in the developed world to point at China as "the largest emitter".

The significance of this change of terminology became clear when the world gathered for a summit meeting on Climate Change at Copenhagen, from which China duly emerged as the villain for having refused to sign up to a system that would include rather more poke-nosing around its installations than it - the rising power of the 21st Century - was ready to accept.

None of the rest of us are quite ready to do without cheap Chinese goods, and those who could get it are not prepared to do with-out Chinese credit which makes living beyond one's means possible. But it was really only African dictators who got stick for dealing with or buying from China.

Copenhagen also highlighted the divorce of "Africa" as a geographical expression, from "Africa" as a political aspiration. Visitors to the northern part of the continent (including the uninvited Europe-bound ones in Libya and Morocco) may have long been accustomed to hearing their Arab ‘brothers' asking them how life is in "Africa" demonstrating how the conti-nent is cut off at the north, so to speak.

But with South Africa's agreement to a 2% rise in global temperatures, apparently without bothering to secure the mandate of the rest of political Africa, this year we discovered that we seem to have been cut off at the south too .We struggled to keep up with the mental twists and turns that might dic-tate our reaction to elec-tions in different parts of the world, especially if we were consumers of news from the United States or Britain.

On the one hand, we had to prepare to wel-come the anticipated (if engineered) election vic-tory of President Hamed Karzai in Afghanistan, if only so that we could all Move On, until stubborn truth about the elections came along to spoil the party. We still had to put a Brave Face on it and Move On because what we needed above all was a face-saving exit-from-Afghanistan strategy.

On the other hand, we US news-watchers had to move swiftly from denunciation of Iran as a theo-cratic dictatorship whose citizens were all such fanatical genocidal anti-Semites that the only questions about bombing them to smithereens were ‘when?' and ‘by whom?', to not only realising that the dictatorship was holding elections (complete with rallies and presidential candidate debates) but that we actually had a dog in the fight too, even if any open embrace was likely to prove politically fatal.

Nigerians may even have noted that cheated voters in Iran didn't pack up and go home after letting off steam to protest being ruled by an oppressive and repressive government which had not improved their material cir-cumstances and for which they hadn't voted, but rather, continued to turn out in their thou-sands on every occasion possible to make their protest heard. For which we joined the rest of the world in saluting and applauding their bravery.

Unfortunately, due to their failure to be ruled by a government that didn't insist on an independent nuclear programme, the rest of the world nonetheless had to steel its heart to the possibility that they would still have to be bombed to smithereens .

Still on elections, this year, illusions that we had an impartial quasi-saint in Aso Rock who was ‘above the fray' were shattered by re-run elections in Ekiti State and Mr. President's gleeful (if questionable) anticipation that the long-suffering citizens of that state would now ‘enjoy' a six-year governorship by the person whose wrongful return by the Independent National Electoral Commission had caused the re-run in the first place.

Nigerians also came to understand the difference between what a ‘Christian conscience' would permit a professed Christian to do, and what - to the embarrassment of religious leaders who rushed to declare support - a professed Christian would actually do.This was the year when Nigerians watched apprentices in the art of doublethink at work, as people pretended to be receiving instructions from what, to everybody else, looked like a closed door behind which they had no idea whatsoever what was going on, or whether there was even a live person there at all.

At the same time, the President, or rather, the Ministers, appoint-ees, family and hangers-on of the President tried to hide the state of his health and resist demands to know what that state was, with obfuscating nonsense about doctor-patient privacy, as though the President was a private person and not the nation's first citizen, its No. 1 Public Servant, the state of whose health is a matter of constitutional significance, and concerns about whose fitness to govern is supposed to trigger con-stitutional consequences.

These and other events in 2009 ought to have woken Nigerians up to the realisation that nobody is going to get us out of the mess we are in, and that 2010 could be a year for us to take our destiny into our own hands. Signs are though, that we will content ourselves with pathetic gratitude for a couple of good roads and a few hours of electric power.