The road to Mogadishu By Tatalo Alamu  •The wreckage of the UN building after the bomb blast Events unfolding in Nigeria ought to concentrate the mind of the most sanguine patriots. It seems that once again, we have started slouching towards disaster like a disoriented bear. The loss of popular sovereignty and legitimacy may not matter to the anti-democratic political class. But the collapse of statehood it invites ought to. Even political smugglers need safe borders, otherwise there is nothing to smuggle. When a National Security Adviser goes on record to affirm that terrorism will be with us for some time to come, there ought to be an immediate price to pay for such abrasive candour. This column has nothing but guarded affection for General Owoye Azazi who reached the pinnacle of his profession against all human odds. Azazi remains one of the finest products of the Nigeria military within its limits and limitations. In other climes, the General’s tacit admission of helplessness in the face of sophisticated and internationalised terrorism facing the nation ought to have been accompanied by his letter of resignation. It bespeaks a terrorised state ensnared by a terrorist cabal. But that will be the day. The real reason why Azazi is vital and remains crucially in place is to provide a balance of terror in the covert struggle between those who are determined to see off Jonathan as an executive aberration and those who are determined to teach them a lesson, no matter what it takes or costs that Nigeria belongs to all. But let it be noted that the preoccupation with the personal security of state actors against the overarching imperative of national security is a tell-tale sign of looming state failure. Azazi’s appearance on television in an ill-judged interview has done nothing to assuage the fear that Nigeria is gradually turning into another Somalia or Pakistan. In Somalia, there has been no functioning state in the last twenty years since Siad Barre was forced to relocate to Abuja. In Pakistan despite periodic elections, the preferred mode of regime change is assassination and coup d’etat. Before our very eyes, Nigeria is turning into another political jungle, and the first law of the jungle is that there is no law in the jungle. This is because the rule of law is replaced by the law of the ruler. The absolute autocrat, as history has taught us, is invariably a naked emperor among half-naked subjects. Society itself reverts to the Hobbesian state of nature where everything is short, nasty and brutish. If the reports of outlandish cruelties, vicious kidnapping, primitive extortion and savage disregard for human life emanating from contemporary Nigeria are anything to go by, we are already there. For significant sections of the Nigerian political society who have waged an unrelenting and bloody struggle against feudal terror and military absolutism in the past fifty years and who have in the process become socialised and acculturated to certain standards of political civilisation, their efforts are about to become naught in the unremitting rot of modern Nigeria. Paradise cannot be surrounded by hell for a long time. It is either they resume the struggle to renegotiate the basis of contemporary Nigeria or they join other forces to effect a revolutionary reconstruction of the entire political jungle. There is no easy way out of this conundrum, but it hurts so badly. As sovereignty ebbs from the Nigerian post-military state, as a combination of vicious adversities drains it of its legitimacy and authority, we must now begin to think the unthinkable and mention the unmentionable. Is this the end of the state as we know it, or are we at the threshold of something like a non-sovereign state? A non-sovereign state which does not derive its authority or raison d’etre from either man or god is a contradiction in terms, but then something new always comes out of Africa. If the current outlandish revelations of Wikileaks are anything to go by, if the harebrained idiocies of those who purport to rule us are to be believed, then one conclusion is inescapable. Nigeria is not ruled by Nigerians or for Nigerians but by a national cartel fronting for an international commodity board or metropolitan charter, the type that was in place at the onset of colonisation and the slave trade. Never in the history of modern civilisation have rulers shown so much contempt and disregard for people trapped in a territorial space, like captives stranded in an occupied zone. If this international contumely is combined with the internal emergencies facing Nigeria, we have a nation totally at the mercy of inclement forces. From the executive through the legislature to the judiciary and helmsmen of special national agencies, they have headed for the American viceroy singing like drugged canaries. America appears like a big maternal and benign canine sorting out rowdy and delinquent puppies. The puppy state is finally here with us. A non-sovereign state because it does not derive its authority or rationale from either god or man is prone to human and divine adversities. Since it superintends a godless society despite the profusion of religious charlatans of all hues, those who genuinely believe that the state should derive its authority from god are up in arms against it. Meanwhile because it does not protect them or cater for their needs and aspirations even while stealing their resources blind, many of those trapped within its jurisdiction engage in acts of political, economic and cultural hostilities towards it. But since sovereign respect flows from sovereign integrity, a non-sovereign state has nothing to advertise but the thieving incompetence of its medieval barons. Due to its lack of internal sovereignty, it cannot flaunt its external sovereignty in the face of determined onslaught by international powers that make it their duty to protect the global order even where this concern is merely fronting for their national interests. Harsh historical lessons learnt in Indo-China, Afghanistan and Cuba taught France, America and Great Britain not to treat organic nations with levity and frivolity. A non-sovereign state is an unviable national space waiting for euthanasia. A non-sovereign state, then, is a failed state ab initio and in vitrio. But because it has already fallen, it does not collapse. The farce can be kept going for a long time, at great human toll and biblical misery. This is the greatest tragedy of contemporary Nigeria. At least a collapsed building can have the rubble removed, but a building waiting to collapse without the benefit of summary demolition can keep the world guessing for a long time. It remains a source of morbid fascination for those who enjoy watching structures that have become a public hazard. To be sure, Nigeria’s journey to state perdition began long before the advent of Goodluck Jonathan. Unlike his mentor and benefactor, General Obasanjo, a celebrated anti-democratic dinosaur with absolute contempt for popular sovereignty, and quite unlike his predecessor, Umaru Yar’Adua, who was essentially a feudal prince in denial, Jonathan initially came across as an untutored democrat willing to learn the rope despite his unflattering lineage. But Jonathan has since added his own firm imprimatur to the despoliation of state authority and legitimacy. If many people were willing to give him the benefit of doubt despite his covert endorsement of the constitutional gangsterism of the last days of Gbenga Daniel, his barely veiled collusion and complicity in the ouster of Justice Salami seems to have been the last straw. The flippant and frivolous disregard of the rule of law is a milestone in Nigeria’s slide into ungovernability and state infamy. Yet, in an awkward and profoundly ironic sense, Salami is a loyal and dependable ally of the Nigerian state and one of the best poster boys for the electoral integrity on which modern state legitimacy and authority rests. By plumping for justice over technical judgement at a critical moment, it was Salami and his much-maligned colleagues who helped to douse the creeping political anarchy and resort to insurrectionary self-help in a vital and volcanic section of the country. But by endorsing and actively encouraging his professional defenestration, Jonathan has undermined his own electoral victory and the legitimacy of his government. If Uwais’ traumatised revelations are to be believed, the Nigerian executive has done its very best to desecrate the judiciary and reduce it to a level of abject self-abasement hitherto unknown even by the standards of its unflattering history. What Obasanjo began by stark bullying and Yar’Adua cemented by furtive bribery, Jonathan has now capped with frantic intimidation. When the President of an Appellate Court begins his tour of duty by disbanding and dispersing electoral tribunals legally empanelled by his predecessor, he has already wittingly or unwittingly undermined the legitimacy and authority of any verdict emanating from such black market electoral panels. One needs not speculate as to whether the judicial outcome will be acceptable to the sullen and implacable Mohammadu Buhari who is terrifyingly coiled like an affronted cobra. The post-military elite consensus on which Nigeria’s Fourth Republic is founded has all but collapsed. The Boko Haram scourge, the arguments about zoning and rotation of power, the strident demand for fiscal federalism, and the increasing assertion of regional sovereignty by the old West, are all nothing but sub-texts of a more fundamental unease at the state of the union. Whether Goodluck Jonathan recognises the tell-tale signs of the looming collapse of the post-military state is immaterial. The heaven does not fall on a single person. What is important from the point of his own survival is for him to wake up to the reality that he has been handed a poisoned chalice by his benefactors. But he can turn the table against them by thinking out of the box for once. The alternative starring us in the face is the road to Mogadishu.