“He stopped at the thresholds of the huts of thousands of the dispossessed, dressed like one of their own;he spoke to them in their own language.Here was living truth at last, not quotation from books…. in direct contact with truth, the crushed forces of the soul rise again…. At Ghandi’s call, India blossomed forth to new greatness, just as once later in earliest times, when Buddha proclaimed the truth of fellow feelings and compassion among fellow living creatures”
Celebrated writer, poet and Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, possessed of a fit of poetic furore could not but compose this emotionally inspirational dittyramb, inspired by an irresistible affection for Mahathma Ghandi, his highly reverred bossom friend, hero and idol.
Tagore it was, who first christened his friend, “Mahathma” meaning “Great Soul” at an occasion when Ghandi visited him at his school in Bengal,and that name stuck with the frequency of a primordial native name.
What is relevantly apt,as necessarily need be stressed, about this poetic epaulette of honor, consists in its evocative reminder of Ibrahim Traore.
Right from the time this strange, bizarre creature had seized the global public imagination,this inspirational dittyramb of the legendary Indian poet had never ceased to cajole my consciousness to venerable submission because nothing could have been more beffiting in adoration of this revolutionary young military Captain for his immense folk-hero appeal to his people coupled with his soaring global appeal.
This soaring meteor at the helm of power in Burkina Faso is another thing entirely. A mystery of an amazing dimension.Today, Traore is the craze, the main mantra on the global lips, the main fad, the dominant current, sentiment and new religion.
His dramatic appearance was as stunning as his astounding ascension.He caught everyone simply unawares, and before ever getting to grip with the reality,the entire space was already awash with a confounding revolutionary upsurge revving and buzzing through the landscape.
Suddenly this land of the great Thomas Sankara became the gravitating cynosure of global spectacles, with America fervently dying like a romantic bride to possess her in love at all cost.
In its incredible larger-than-life unfolding,the revolutionary contagion has attained such a saturated magnitude that it presses beyond the landscape of that nation in an evangelistic ardour that the global world of nations could simply not resist.
Could one have believed a super-power nation like America,in its unfettered celebration of the lachrymal,much akin to a cry-cry baby – if one could go so banal in referencing the popular local lingo,or like a jilted lover inconsolably dying to fraternise with this otherwise regarded “paper-weight entity”which until of recent,had languished at the backwaters of unreckoning, being amongst the poorest nations of the world.
Prayers and goodwill had continually poured forth in their torrents from virtually every parts of the globe by the mass of progressive humanities,expressing their unalloyed loyalty to this revolutionary icon.Youths and students including progressive bodies from various parts of the world especially Africa,are not left out.Far from it.
If anything,they are the forces particularly taking the fore-most lead in their impregnable buffer of support aimed at revving the engine of the revolution to an ever greater momentum.
This outpour of goodwill and torrents of solidarity assurances had transformatively mutated to a defensive weaponry which had kept the reactionary super-power oligarchs dazzled and confused at the potent threat of the Burkina Fasso strongman starring as a stoutly dangerous challenge with incipient potential to usurp their suzerainty.
America and France,and their few imperial allies are jittery not perfunctorily just for Traore and Burkina Fasso, but particularly for the multiplier long-run conscientisation,which his iconic neo-colonialist defiance portends as setting the lead for a daring diplomatic bull-shit-unreckoning with a nation that hitherto ranks itself as the number one super-power giant, culminating for it,in a gradual descension to a ground-zero demystification.
As the number one super-power that mattered most on the globe, that nations all over the globe fall headlong upon one another,to parley,wine and dine with; could it ever be imagined that this nation of the most exalted caliber could coquetishly extend such a deferential treat of invitation for a parley to any nation at all on earth, even Russia and Russia would just discard it into a garbage can without giving it a thought
Now imagine a lesser slide regression of America, now playing the genuflecting Uncle Tom, going so down-scale to Africa, particularly no other country but an otherwise “discountenable inconsequential entity” like Burkina Fasso.But rather than jump at it;scorn! bullshit! to hell! was the word! – leaving Trump absolutely lost in guard, melting like a crying baby.
For those who may not have known,the fore-going reminds us of that epic moment that Mao,the great Chinese leader,shocked the world with his famous phrase that “the Atomic bomb is less than a paper tiger – going further in condescending demystification of the Super-power bully,by saying that “all reactionaries including America,are paper tigers,since victory in a war is more determined by the people.”
A cogent point which unfortunately might hitherto not be known to many is the considerable extent to which this famous affirmation of Mao and his international revolutionary idea, coupled with his brilliant theory of guerilla warfare had contributed to the disastrous humiliation of America in the Vietnam war – just as Cuba, a tiny nation at the proximal backyard contiguity to America, was able to torment the later with audacious impunity;devoid of back-lash reprisal of any sort.
In all these, the African affirmation as underscored in the sensational diplomatic bluff by the young dynamic Captain stands out in eminently tall distinction, especially when you consider the fact as authoritatively posited by Ali Mazrui,the celebrated Kenyan scholar, who described the African race as the most marginalized of all races in history – arguing on a comparative note that while the travails of the Jews was just for a limited span of time – the barbaric savagery unleashed against the blacks, dating back from the era of slave trade, continues even to date;even if in a subtle inhuman guile.
Of course, the brigandage on Africa’s natural resources,in its unimaginable rapacity – couldn’t have been more succinctly put, than in the terrifying account of Professor Walter Rodney, the celebrated Guyanese and fore-most intellectual martyr who was gruesomely assassinated in a horrendous Car-bomb; in “How Europe Under-developed Africa” – an authoritatively unequalled expository of all-time classics detailing the height of man’s wickedness to man.
Chauvinistic racist whites, cashing in on the bigoted myth of white racial supremacist in the ilks of de Gobineau mischievously contrived a most banal description of Africa,ignobly portrayed as “The Dark Continent” devoid of any ennobling history of past civilization or innate native genius, and therefore fit for nothing.
It was this grotesquely barbaric concept on which they had leveraged to subject the teeming mass of blacks and Africans in particular, to savage treat of such unimaginable hue that continues to rankle the human conscience for ages,dating back in its primitive obscenity,from the commodity marketing of fellow homo sapien African blacks; keckled and carfefulled in chains;hands,legs and neck – with mouth bridled in padlock as they careered our hapless forbears as animals into centuries of slavery and slave trade.
It was equally by this racial world view of the most unimaginable bestiality that Africa was to be dragooned at a later phase to a long punitive continuum of colonialism.
Infact,looking back,it was apparent that the mounting current of humanitarian sentiment which culminated in the abolition of slave trade was only at best, what it seemed.Mere facade and not real.
Plainly expressed, the humanitarian dummy, was in its absolutely self-evidential description,a dummy,meant to conceal the fact that the mounting tide of Industrial revolution as a modernising paradigm shift in the mode of production,unfolding for the first time in Great Britain as the hub of the transformative dynamics which places machines in utilitarian premium importance over the brawn of human labor, essentially renders the later, irrelevant.
It is against this background that we can begin to understand the revolutionary emanations of amazing magnitudes oozing from this Multum in Pavo known as Burkinna Fasso.
Theoretically, it’s not as if the popular clamor for an African risorgimento as being charted by this emergent strongman of Burkinna Fasso was anything novel.No.Far from any new-fangled concept,this had indeed been the sing-song,a popular mantra,the forensis streptimus deriving from ages echoeing and resonating to tiresomely sickening cliche in its repeatedly umpteeneth resonance; evoking the popular marxian tenet that “philosophers had interpreted the world,what remains is for them to change it.”
It is against this background that the enigmatic Ibrahim Traore stands out in his revolutionary departure from sheer theoretical faddism to the corporeal accomplishment of a doer.
The fore-going finds a corroborative approval in Richard Nixon in his reasoned affirmation that “It’s not enough for a leader to know the right thing. The would-be leader without the judgement or perception to make the right decision fails for lack of vision.The one who knows the right thing but cannot achieve it, fails because he is ineffectual. The greatest leader needs both the vision and the capacity to achieve what is right.He hires managers to help him to do so but only he can set the direction and provide the motive force”
With sheer brawn of resolute action, and ethereal visionary zeal,this magician had practically conveyed a disquitionary thesis of the most superior authority in the utilitarian interface of theory and practice.
In this connection, Traore must have stolen this epic lead from earliest exemplars in the mould of the Osagyefo, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and particularly Mahathma Gandhi, the skinny little frail man, epitome of meekness and quintessential dove, imbued with an unbelievablely resilient heart of steel;who admonished Indians to go to jail, rather than co-operate with the British.
He spun his own few garments on his spinning wheel and asked others to do same.In 1930, when the British imposed a heavy salt tax, Ghandi led a march 165 miles to the sea, to make his own salt.
In similar vein did he also ban the importation of cloth to India, insisting that India should go naked if they could not manufacture the clothe they would wear. Today, India ranks as one of the leading clothe manufacturing nations in the world .
At this juncture,one cannot but chip in an apt and timely notifier that the powerful revolutionary hurricane presently sweeping through in Burkinna Fasso portends an incipient signal to sleeping nations perpetually trapped in the jingo-ring inertia of motion without movement to rather sit right in alignment with the progressive dynamics or sink as irredeemable casualties under the foot mat of the revolution
Having tarried for so long,the raging wave of metamorphosis is in an impatient hurry to devastate anything anathemic to its dialectically ordained destiny.
This empirical self-evident truth is particularly important as a warning bugle because nothing is as unstoppable as an idea whose time has come
Of course poignantly instructive in this regard was the Arab Spring in Tunisia, whose seismic quakes spawned an uncontrollable blitzkrieg up-rooting the antediluvian old order of Kakistocracy and its hedonistic potentates hitherto hedged on the delusive conceit of messiahship divinely ordained from above on a redeeming mission from every imaginary shackledom.
To be sure,the revolution took a first shot in Tunisia,but it certainly would not stop there, until it had criss-crossed the vast geo-political landscape of North Africa,toppling the apple-cart of political powers and personalities hitherto extant in their inane do-nothingism in Egypt,Algeria and even Libya.
Still on the hydra-headed tendency of revolutionary tremors, as empirically deducible from history,it becomes equally apposite to remind us for convincing clarity, of the 1789 revolution in France, spreading to distant parts of Europe and even as far as Egypt in Africa. Coupled with the fore-going was the 1830 revolution which began in France and Belgium and the 1848 revolution, initially erupting in Sicily, cascading equally in its fissiparous replication far beyond, in a mortal kiss of distant parts of Europe.
Equally apposite was the fact that the Aba Women’s Riot of 1929 which began like a joke in Aba,did not abate until it had over-reached the present areas of Uyo,Oron,Calabar, Abak, Owerri, Ikot Ekpene just as it equally rustled its tidal wind to Andoni, Opobo, and other areas in the Opobo Division in the present River State
Of course,it was the revolutionary catharsis of this Amazonic heroes in Aba and their colleagues, in which the mother of Justice Udo Udoma of blessed memory lost her life, that similarly inspired the 1949 Egba Women’s Riot,led by Mrs. Funmilayo Ransome Kuti and Grace Eniola Soyinka;Wole Soyinka’s mother,which forced the then Alake of Egbaland Oba Ademola to abdicate his throne,just as the five Majors who master-minded the January 15 coup of 1966,were veritably inspired by their experience, as members of the Peace-Keeping for ces, during the political earthquake in Congo,in which the legendary martyr,Patrice Emery Lumumba lost his life
It is against this background that it becomes apposite to sound a reveille for an early alert essentially necessary to heed, in alignment with the tide of change, in order to avoid the looming tempest affrighteninly lurking by the corner.
Remember that Karl Marx empirically informed by the horrifying sadism of the labor situation during the emergent era of the Industrial revolution,had signaled the prognosis that the next major revolution after the 1789 revolution in France, was certain beyond peradventure, to erupt in Britain.
But Britain confounded the pessimistic doomsday apocalypse of Marx and his league of Communists all over the world by their visionary introduction of creative reforms that pragmatically availed with astounding success in staving off the looming specter of a violent revolution.
At this juncture, one cannot but sympathise with the incumbent president, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu,an exemplary leader,renowned for his distinctive badge of excellence, if his experiences on the Lagos gubernatorial cockpit is anything to go by.
Unfortunately, he had inherited quite a stupefying putrescence of huge government debt, massive infrastructural poverty, insatiable larceny on the public till,amongst a wider encompassing saga of abysmal failure,deriving in the main,from the accursed, mediocre and crassly inept, infantile, visionless and destructive squandermania of the notorious Shagari administration – the worst we had ever experienced in the annals of political governance of the country since independence.
Second to the fore-going in its unmitigated celebration of wastage, brainlessness and visionlesness of the highest order worsened by his demonic electoral spending all in the bid to retain his presidential seat as if money was going out of fashion – was Good luck Jonathan’s tragedy of presidential mis-adventure.What a great shame!
Coming almost at par, was Ibrahim Babangida whose little cutting edge, by way of an attenuating concession,was his ambitious drive at rural-urban integration under the aegis of DFFRI.As a journalist always on the entourage of Governor Mike Akhigbe of Lagos State, at every Rural Development Week,in the mid 80s to the 90s,often holding every February of the year,at which period we will tour the entire nooks and crannies of Lagos State for a whole week,I state without being immodest that I can attest as a first hand witness.
And of course for Obasanjo,he will remain ever liable for the huge millions of dollars of which he had practically nothing to flaunt in the name of electricity project for which the abysmally failed project was pencilled.Of course the equally collosal inheritance from the Buhari administration, undeniably features in no mean visibility in these uncheering saga.
But this does not vitiate the need for the present regime in Nigeria,not only to be at constant red alert,but also accelerate the momentum of progressive action to higher frontiers than ever.Particularly deserving of this timely
warning prognosis are those abhorrent hosts of polities reeking in crass socio-political decadence inundating every space of the continent.They better hearken before it’s too late.
This point becomes particularly germane because the African political landscape is gradually being saturated with martial imageries bordering even if unconsciously on a doctrinaire point of conscientisation.
More emphatically spelt,Traore and the likes might be a departing metaphor for incipient military acculturation,the groundswell of which may already have been in subterranean formation,which sooner than later,holds out an augury,whether for good or bad,as a legitimising fad for military usurpation and governance, as an effective option for resolution of the African socio-economic conundrum.
In this regard, Alexander Pope readily avails as a parting shot,in his celebrated pithy remark: “For forms of government, let fools contend.Whatever is best administered is best”.
*Kola Johnson Is A Writer And Journalist.
