In mid-19th-century Ibadan, military expeditions under Balogun Ibikunle were so successful in slave-catching that by 1859, the city was gripped in the apprehension that it had harvested more slaves than it could control. Professor Bolanle Awe, citing missionary Hinderer’s Half-Yearly Report of Ibadan Station for that year, wrote that the oracle of Oke Badan had to intervene with a decree that Ibadan should desist from going to war for some time because there were ‘too many strange people in the town.’
People choke on their own success. If you doubt this, read Awe’s ‘Ajele System: A Study of Ibadan Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century’, published in December 1964. Power that eats with ten fingers, that feeds on endless acquisition will, sooner or later, find itself choking on its own gluttony.
At about the same period Ibadan trembled over the spectre of a slave insurrection, similar fears were roiling the American South. In May, 1939, distinguished professor of history, Harvey Wish (4 September, 1909 – 7 March, 1968), published his ‘The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1856’. In 1856, according to Wish, Stewart and Montgomery counties in Tennessee were gripped by panic. The combined slave population in those places stood at about 12,000 against 19,000 whites, but in many localities, the enslaved outnumbered their masters. In the iron districts along the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, eight to ten thousand slaves laboured in mines and furnaces under a handful of overseers. A house stuffed with captives soon loses peace especially when the enslaved start demanding rights. The fear that the captives in those American communities might rise became as real as the chains that bound them.
The twin anxieties of Ibadan and Tennessee of the 1850s should speak to today’s All Progressives Congress (APC), which seems to have embarked on its own form of political slave-raiding expeditions, capturing opposition governors, lawmakers, and chieftains in a frenzy of conquest. History teaches that those who live by conquest often reel in pains of indigestion. Ask Afonja of Ilorin. The slaves he encouraged to defect into his army proved his nemesis.
There is that Nigerian comedian who combs his bald head. He is there online feasting on APC’s defection binge. The jester’s conclusion is that by 2027, Nigeria’s epic contest will be between APC and APC, a scenario he says will burst the belly of the overfed. There is a limit to how much the human stomach can hold before it rebels against its own greed. All manner of gluttony, including the political, have their limits and dangers. What Tennessee feared in 1856 did, indeed, happen in some places. Read Harvey Wish.
The Yoruba have sweet street slangs. You’ve heard of curing madness with madness (‘wèrè l’a fi nwo wèrè’). You’ve not heard of ‘ko were, ko were.’ Packing all sorts into all sorts; orísirísi. The Yoruba word ‘were’ means madness or the mad themselves. In some contexts ‘were’ also means idiocy/idiot; stupid/stupidity. ‘Ko were, ko were’ is what my village friends call men who go for anything in a skirt. It is also what the rapacious do with their molue: Forty-nine sitting, ninety-nine standing. The bus is ‘fully full’, yet, the driver and conductor still yell to the street to hop in: ‘Wolé! Enter! No change!’ It is never enough until some cranial vessels yield to bursting.
Shakespeare’s Angelo says in ‘Measure for Measure’ that ‘we must not make a scarecrow of the law, setting it up to fear the birds of prey.’ We do that here. All our laws are scared and afraid of power. People break the law and dare the law to say something.
A tributary is a smaller river or stream that flows into a larger river or lake. River Oba is a tributary of the Osun River; it flows into it. The law says you can divorce River Oba, if you like, but you cannot give Oba’s child to Osun, your new husband. The powerful can snatch the wife of the weak, but he cannot snatch the child of the weak. Our constitution expressly forbids lawmakers from hopping from bed to bed, party to party, doing what common prostitutes do. Section 68(1)(g) of the constitution bars senators and Reps from contracting the syphilis of defection. Section 109(1)(g) prescribes the same taboo for lawmakers at the state level. Those two sections say if you insist on courting leprosy, you must be prepared to live in a leper colony, alone.
Our constitution says that a legislator who strays from the banner that bore him to victory must surrender his seat.
That law is dead here even when the exception to the rule is not present. The exception, the law says, is that defection is allowed only when there is a division within the legislator’s party or the party has merged with another. There is no division, there is no merger, yet lawmakers after lawmakers have changed parties like pants without consequences.
When is a democracy dead? It is dead when opposition sells itself to power. It is dead when law is dead, or whenever it is helpless; when rule of men replaces the rule of law; when government of men overthrows government of laws. Rule of men is a personal rule; it is what sits on the throne in an unaccountable society; a society in the mouth of dogs.
Aristotle wrote that ‘It is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens.’ American professor of Law, Paul Gowder, in the winter of 2018 wrote ‘Resisting the Rule of Men’. Gowder contrasts ‘the rule of men’ to ‘the rule of law.’ He says ‘I will say that we have ‘the rule of men’ or ‘personal rule’ when those who wield the power of the state are not obliged to give reasons to those over whom that power is being wielded-from the standpoint of the ruled, the rulers may simply act on their brute desires.’ Is that not what politicians do when, with impunity, they cross the road and dash their husbands’ children to their more powerful, wealthy lover across the street? Yet, they say this is a democracy.
‘Democracy-What Is It?’ Theodore M. Hart in a 1948 edition of The Georgia Review asked as he threw the question at a class of veterans. He got 32 answers. The last of the answers, he says, is the ‘farthest thing from a definition that could well be imagined.’ This is it: ‘The right to defy a ruler, the right to believe in the right, the right to read the truth, the right to speak the truth, the sky free of destruction, the water free of danger, the trees, the earth, the house I live in, my friends and relatives, the school I go to, the church I attend – that’s Democracy.’ It is a mouthful. Before that definition, there have been shorter ones that we won’t like to teach our kids here. One of them says ‘Democracy’ is ‘that no man should have more power than another.’ Another says it is ‘a government in which the source of authority (political) must be and remain in the people and not in the ruler.’ The opposite holds sway here. Ruling party politicians are the law; it is into their maximum ocean that all rivers must empty their waters.
Politicians, governors and lawmakers of all tendencies are massing into one party, the ruling party, like the forces of Julius Caesar whose feet are already in the Rubicon. There is also the perception that the judiciary is collapsing (or has collapsed) its structures into the ruling party.
It is futile as it is dangerous, self-destructive and self-destructing to seek to have a Kabiyesi presidency, a democracy without opposition. French philosopher, Montesquieu, in his Esprit des Lois, published in I748, wrote: ‘There would be an end of everything if one man or one body, whether of princes, nobles, or people exercised these three powers: that of making the laws, of executing the public resolutions, and of judging the cases of individuals.’
William Shakespeare in ‘Measure for Measure’ warns that possessing great power tempts one toward tyranny.
Shakespeare’s character, Isabella, tells power-drunk Angelo, deputy to the Duke of Vienna:
‘O! it is excellent
To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.’
Now, what is the value and essence of a presidential power that cannot crush, enslave or imprison governors? Where is the value?
In George Orwell’s novel, ‘1984’ we are shown that the party’s omnipotence is not freedom but imprisonment. The story teller asks humanity to accept that the pursuit of total power, total control over thought, over history, and reality, traps power and the power wielder in perpetual manipulation.
But power is powerful; it never listens to reason. Ikem Osodi, Chinua Achebe’s radical character says in ‘Anthills of the Savannah’ that ‘The prime failure of rulers is to forget that they are human.’ Are rulers really human? In Yoruba history and belief, they are ‘alase’ (executive) deputy of the gods. Before Achebe there was Lord Acton who famously said that ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.’ Someone said power, when unrestrained, imprisons its possessor in illusion.
It is not the fault of power that it extends and distends and stretches itself thin. It is because the world seductively craves the king’s dominance. So, let us not blame power; we should blame the people as they query the worth of freedom that bears no food. Because literature is life, it is there in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. There, we read in The Grand Inquisitor’s monologue, a story within a story: ‘For who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands?’ The Inquisitor informs the Lord that humanity had ‘taken the sword of Caesar, and in taking it, of course, have rejected Thee and followed him.’ They will always follow Caesar because he alone has bread to distribute from north to south.
The devil is not a liar; if he is a liar, he won’t say the truth. And what is the truth? It is in the Inquisitor’s mouth, it is that seeing freedom and bread walking together is inconceivable; that no science will give the people bread ‘so long as they remain free.’ Governors, senators, Reps – all have surrendered to the bread and butter of power. Automatic tickets, automatic victory at the polls, cheap victory over the people. What power is saying in silence is said loudly by Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor: ‘In the end, they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, ‘Make us your slaves, but feed us.”