Page I
The postcolonial world is a dangerous dualistic prism. Both the ruler and the ruled walk between precipitous lines of forged but certainly unpretentiously doomed identities. Unfortunately for the most part living inside of the darkly haunted tinted glass corridors of power preclude the leaders’, especially, the powerful from rational abilities, from any sensibilities or sensibleness whatsoever for engaging their own myth of power. For example the most recent case of post democratic ruler Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria now relives, for many, the frighteningly disambiguous reappearance of Orwellian Nineteen Eighty-Four in the postcolony, as though for an Emmy awards.
The reappearance, after a short period of the doomed democratic dispensation by President Goodluck Jonathan, of the dystopic–of military-styled rule for Africa’s largest economy in the most populous black nation on earth tops the achievement list of America’s Barack Obama’s eight-year rule. Defined along beggarly, terror-breeding, aid-seeking, disease-infested rhetorics Obama’s Africa in truth appears for Buhari to be the most urgently needed-for-immediate-recasting Behemoth. Inside Buhari dwells a retributive 1987–many say it is in fact a 17th century era-styled rule–pregnancy with beastly tyrannical, incompatible ideas of leadership, toxic to the core even for the most barbarous country justifiably so-named in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Buhari, as Obama would definitely have unexpected, vitally plays a much-needed role for which his predecessor was mostly unsuited, woefully failed to perform, or, to be fair to Jonathan, practically was an idiot to Nigeria’s robustly political ethnic nationalisms. Any unambiguous nationalism in Africa is detrimental in the eyes and to the image of Empire; the unprofitability of transAtlantic slave trade brought the transformation into colonial rule. Rather than simply imagine that Europe and the west gained ascendancy in their intellectual or moral evolution, one needs to see through the layers of economic woes in Europe which led eventually to new complex social needs and realities such as innovations with scriptures and religious imaginings.
Colonialism therefore is the much cost effective economy of slave making on the enslaved lands. Deforming and redefining original landowners into the colonized thus became a fine phraseolgy for naming the new enslaved.
Medium transformed. Humanity deformed. Resources reclaimed. For Europe’s and America’s enrichment Africa was the fitting slaughterhouse.
The remaking, remodeling, reselling, reappearance of Buhari as Nigeria’s white knight was no more than a fraudulent social-political gimmick which in retrospect deserves investigation by consumer protection agencies because we never were warned with any caveat emptor: buyer be warned. As it turned out Buhari was not prepared for the changes he met in Nigeria’s significantly altered social and viral planes. Defiant of court orders, due process, denying access to justice, attempting and reclaiming public discursive spaces, muffling social critic, killing and maiming protesters, arresting dissidents, threatening the democratic order are his only means of accessing and fomenting power. Despite the fact that his vice president another from a third of the dominant ethnic nations in Nigeria is a senior learned character Buhari’s malfeasance portray an effetely incapacitated undemocratic, and tepidly disconnected ruler.
Afraid of owning up to making silly gaffe as voting in a despot for a democratic dispensation our intellectuals in their high hills continue to pray through plying of accidental rhetorics to hide their own public intellectually asocial flatulence. Enflamed in personal egos which cut across socioreligious, ethnic, economic, and class lines, painting their human errors in inflated laureate-styled opium temporarily relieves these of responsibility, assuming they can manage to save their faces from this phase in intellectual mischaracterizations and deformations. Opinionated, self-destruct awaits the individuals who do not seek to freely buy from the understanding that nature corrects itself; the uncreated energies manage to bring about cosmic equilibrium: energy is neither created nor destroyed. To create any imbalance is the origins of injustice, and this will be–sought to be– rectified one way or the other.
coming soon… Page II