Monday Lines
It is amazing that we survived the year 2015 in one piece despite all the fears and tears, wear and tear. It wasn’t just a year of transition from the known PDP with its undisguised ugliness to an unknown APC with its many masked faces. The year that just ended hosted interesting fights of pigs and humans with mud and dirt soiling unexpected hands. It was a year public service workers were no longer sure they had jobs. It was a year governors realised the minimum wage harboured maximum threats to their comforts.
Two thousand and fifteen was a year prophets lost their innocence as all predictions refused to obey their commands. The year 2015 came with fears of the very end but ended with sighs of relief as Nigeria survived the superpower prophecy of ultimate dissolution. In 2015, Nigeria, as usual, pulled back from the brink where it danced so dangerously. It was a year everybody was on trial the government, the governed; the Senate and its president; the judiciary with its hood; the media and its pen.
It was a year you travelled abroad and realised you couldn’t buy what you liked with your money again. It was a year your kids schooling abroad called and wondered why their country would not let them have access to their pocket money even when their parents weren’t thieves. It was a year new things started happening. The good, the bad, the ugly, all bore the smell of Change.
It was a year pensioners continued to wail and cry over unpaid service entitlements. It was a year retirees’ unpaying nation budgeted N2.3billion for eleven big persons’ comfort and further tens of billions to buy big cars for the pigs of Animal Farm. It was a year of great revelations showing the genesis of a people’s ailments. 2015 was a year that prepared the grounds for the year 2016; the prologue to a repeat of 1984.
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1984 and 2016
“‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’
Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.
‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined…
“… The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means, you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognise their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?” (O’Brien in George Orwell’s 1984).
What you call the past may actually be the prologue to your today or your tomorrow. In the past, you heard of the blood-curdling horrors of Al-Qaeda and Al-Shabab. They have turned out to be just introductory paragraphs to some other things deadlier, more lethal. Today, ISIS and Boko Haram have upped the ante, the bar is raised. Humanity loses its innocence as it struggles to refine its crude essence. We all have something in our past presaging our future. For President Muhammadu Buhari, his past as military ruler brought him back as civilian president. It was the prologue to his story. One of the most fascinating story books I have read is George Orwell’s 1984. I am not sure today’s loquacious selfie- taking generation has had the appetite to read it. I think they should, especially as they enter the year 2016 with all its promises. In Orwell’s 1984, Newspeak is the language; there is whiteblack, doublespeak. I am sure if smartphones exist in Orwellian 1984, it would be capital sin to take photos of anything not to mention of the self. Big Brother will not allow any spoilt brat endanger the state with unapproved images.
1984 is an extreme story and humanity is flying towards that extremity if we are not there already. For the Twitter/ Facebook generation, this may not make any meaning but they may have to live it to make meaning out of it.
I was around in the year 1984, and after watching President Buhari’s first media chat last week, I realised he has read the book too. And we read books for different reasons. Some read to forget their sorrows, some to learn new things, some to hone their skills, some to entertain themselves, some to just chew on something while the clock ticks. I read for all the reasons. Why do you read – and what do you read?
Watching Buhari’s chat on Wednesday, I strongly felt the president read 1984 to mock George Orwell’s amateurish conjectures on how to run what Germans call Polizeistaat. I saw Buhari’s steely self come out as he was asked the Dasuki/Nnamdi Kanu question. I heard the president as he explained that those two couldn’t enjoy the bail the courts gave them because they were in protective custody and can’t be allowed to jump bail. I heard him and I said, yes, finally we have a protective president. As it was with pre-1984 politicians, these ones need to be protected too. The courts can’t do that. The Villa can. I was around in 1984. I connected immediately with General Buhari as he repeatedly regaled us with his first coming tales. I need to read again George Orwell’s dystopian story. Democracy kills. Freedom can be slavery; slavery can be freedom. If you are one of those who sincerely think these are normal times, I think you should read it too to know that the past is truly a prologue to tomorrow and that you need proper guidance on how to climb the mountains of the new year, and the next, and the next without falling into Big Brother’s hands. Please do.
Meanwhile, I wish all of us (including the Wailing Wailers and their Hailing Hailers counter-team) a very happy 2016.
