This week in Prospect online, Jonathan Power looks at the state of Nigeria. It’s more than a year since Olusegun Obasanjo stepped down as president. His successor, Umaru Yar’Adua, has been nicknamed “Mr Go Slow” by the press for his cautious style of decision-making. Might Obasanjo, seeing the country’s progress stall, be tempted to stand for president again?
Also this week, Lesley Chamberlain revels in her roof garden. Provided that you have a head for heights, roof terraces are part of the poetry of the city, offering panoramic views and the chance to rise above the hectic urban world.
Nice piece. I think that Seneca’s quoted view reflects the Augustan and Julio-Claudian intellectuals’/artists’ attitude towards the growth in luxury, excess etc. (Petronius’ Satyricon is the classic text). Poets like Horace and the later satyrists issue dire warnings against human ‘hubris’ in building piers out over the sea, and challenging the gods. So the capacity and inventiveness of Roman engineering sets itself up for a fall - such as the eruption of Vesuvius. Roof gardens and pleasure piers would be bracketed together as ‘un-natural’. But as the article implies, there’s also a large element of the ‘rus in urbe’ idealised nostalgia (Daphis & Chloe) for the countryside going alongside increasing urbanisation. Cf. Raymond Williams’ ‘The Country and the City’ which looks at this phenomenon in the UK through English literature since the 16th century.
Dear Sir:
One would need a classical lexicon to decipher the ins and outs of the Roman Republic and the issue of endeavour as template for Africa.
The truth is that it is going to take a little while longer to reach beyond the colonial era and its paradigms of country and city to arrive at a post-colonial particularly African modality of state.
Northern and Western concepts of the state via a rags to riches democratic oligarchy are simply not impinging in Africa, and Mugabe and Mbeki are struggling to find formats for any future.
It is not helped by the fact that we have lost a thinker in John Paul II who had the courage to reflect on the new directions of the 2oth Century politikon in terms of patria - in his last book on Memory and Identity. The new pope in Rome seems content to restrict himself to issues of church infrastructure where some guidance from a German philosopher would have been helpful for young African states.
We can take some indices from those states that used to belong to the CCCP and the soviet empire - many once unhinged from the apron-strings of that empire embraced a new nationalism and belief in their own culture and this echoes something that JP-II says - that some cultures are impossible to stifle - they will out. A new nationalism in Africa is on the cards but it could be wedded to constructive goals and projects by a helpful Russia or Iran. These are the middlemen who understand the continent better than we as ex-colonials and general pests in the Camusian sense of the word.
So a new Africa, and hopefully also a new Nigeria - one that can transcend the limits of old western categories and western anglican type establishmentarian institutionalism. A new west will emerge too soon but it will do so only when it has imbibed the vision of The Napoleon of Notting Hill and helped other nations to do so too without rancour.
There are paradigms for Africa - Russia in 1917, France in 1789, Ireland in 1916, Portugal in 1978 - all these states had to achieve a new memory and through it a new identity.
Silas Carr
Dear Sir:
Comments upon the futures industry, be it in Araby or in Africa, especially from Western sources tend to overlook the virtues and strengths of the old British imperial system. We labour from old guard socialist and soviet bias among our politically correct mandarins in most offices of the Foreign Office and in Whitehall - a survival from the time when we did not know what the Romanovs had to go through to achieve immortality and martyrdom for their faith.
Moreover despite Silas Carrr’s remarks above, we from a little corner of the West are now placed in a situation of strength in places like Araby and Africa not because of the Americans but despite the Americans. Lovely well-intentioned people they are, but their oaths to defend their narrowly-written and narrowly-conceived constitution makes them unfit to govern the tribal zones of Africa - but especially in Araby. Democracy is a delicate flower that cannot be imposed by republican diktat on clan or tribal civilisations.
The British on the other hand always allowed in the past for local colour, local custom and local religion, and only intervened when some important principle of natural justice was at stake or when local tribal chieftains misbehaved - a great quality of the Pax Britannica that emulated the Pax Romana, and one which is thoroughly lacking in the Pax Americana of today. And it is only naturally so, since the average American soldier, brave as he is, is given a narrow slate on which to write his orders of the day - to impose an American republican belief in the democratic process on the tribes and clans of Africa and Araby - or is it just an oligarchy of the rich that he is imposing? We did not make mistakes in Aden or Ireland in the age of empire - these were made for us by unfeeling local barons - nor even in the Indian mutiny - these were local merchants. The Pax Britannica is still workable and our struggle agin domestic and internecine violence is winnable.
We will have a long way to go to return the regions above to normalcy but only the British have the tradition of governance to do it. America has lost her war with the Arabs and lost her bickering campaign against the French - it is now time for the British to intervene and meet with local leaders. Partition does work in our experience and could work in Kurd, Sunni and Shia Iraq. We must allow our classically trained diplomats in the FO time to heal old wounds.
Edmund Campion
This is a test comment.
Jonathan Power’s, “State Of Nigeria,” is nothinfg short of the work of a political hack. Mr. Power. whatever his intentions, does not show an understanding of the deep feelings of the average Nigerian neither does he seems to care about the years of abuse of the people by its rulers since “independence” in 1960.
As he informed in the article, he is a friend of Obasanjo, and he should come out to tell us that Obasanjo, paid him to write this worthles article disguised as an objective overview of the country. For the author, to gloss over the intractable problems that were foisted on the country especially under Obasanjo, is dishonest and outright hypocritical at best.