Seven Types Of Terror

It is just as well that President Goodluck Jonathan is reported to have embarked on widespread consultations on the letter sent to him by the National Judicial Council over its decision to reinstate the substantive president of the Appeal Court, Justice Issa Ayo Salami. The earlier letter to suspend him arrived at the presidency swiftly and post-haste and Jonathan acted swiftly and post-haste.

But this time around, the letter took four full days to arrive at the presidency obviously ambushed for further consultations by the judicial occultists of Aso Rock. Even the famed Idogo train travelled much faster in those days. We thank god and our good luck for small mercies. We are still far away from the days of the ancient Greek Empire when official letters were dispatched through marathon runners.

Consultations are a necessary and desirable tool of modern governance. In a fractious, heterogeneous and multi-national polity like ours, consultation is the lubricant of effective and just decision-making. Judging by how well earlier consultations, particularly on the oil subsidy fiasco, had helped President Jonathan, we have no doubt that a glorious resolution of the judicial impasse is around the corner.

Meanwhile, as the president is busy with his consultations, the NJC should ask Justice Salami to resume at his post without any further ado, even at the risk of some constitutional stress. This is the only way to ensure the separation of power and horizontal accountability which are the hallmark of modern governance. In recent past, the Nigerian judiciary has suffered grave abuse and self-abuse. This is a golden opportunity to redeem itself. We cannot say that because a child should not die it should be given an elder’s scrotum as football.

However that may be, it is useful to alert the nation about seven types of terror that is currently stalking it. The first is judicial terrorism. This is the kind of terror Justice Salami succumbed to. It works sometimes in a sublime and surreptitious manner and sometimes with brazen brigandage.

First, terror is unleashed on the judiciary in order to encourage it to unleash terror on the opposition. Famously, the English have observed that from time to time, an admiral is usually quartered just to encourage the others. From time to time in Nigeria, an upright and fearless judge is put through the judicial guillotine to serve as a deterrent. Mass compliance with political evil and herd misconduct naturally follow. This is judicial totalitarianism at its most brazen and obscene.

The post-independence history of the Nigerian judiciary is littered with the examples of heroic judges who have been wantonly persecuted at the altar of political expediency or mercilessly slaughtered at the abattoir of political infamy. The result has been a steady deterioration in the quality and efficacy of judicial intervention in our political process and a wanton desecration of the sacred principles of justice on which modern society is founded.

Judicial abracadabra and legal legerdemain became the order of the day. Black market injunctions flourished. Venal satisfaction was given to the highest bidder. Narrow technicalities and juridicial razzmatazz replaced sound judgement. Supreme Court justices were openly accused of taking bribes and no subsequent suicide was reported.

Recently, it took a British court to expose the hollow ritual and chicanery that have replaced justice in Nigeria. It is a shame, an abject shame of world-historic proportions. While the dominated faction of the Nigerian political society has been at the receiving end of judicial terrorism, the judiciary itself has virtually imploded under the weight of its own iniquities and contradictions.

When a judiciary is so openly politicised as it is the case with the current Nigerian judiciary, political crimes are systematically legalised. Let the Nigerian judiciary begin its self-cleansing with the Justice Salami issue and in doing so, it may yet save Nigeria itself from inevitable political perdition.

The second type of terror is political terror. Judicial terrorism is the handmaiden of political terrorism. Political terrorism is the hunting ground and main weapon of those who insist that a heterogeneous, multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi- cultural nation like Nigeria must become a one-party nation either by force or by fake and manufactured consensus. Rigging, electoral heists and political assassinations are their preferred route to this political Elysium.. This is the tragedy of cultivating democracy without practising democrats.

The Fourth Republic is particularly notorious for political terrorism. Never in the history of post-colonial Africa has a combination of residual military despotism and innate authoritarian disposition produced such a democratic fiasco. Obasanjo famously abolished the Nigerian electorate in the worst election in the history of the continent. In an infamous Freudian slip, he had pronounced that elections are a do or die affair. And so it has been.

While acknowledging the grave flaws in the election that brought him to power, Umaru Yar’Adua, his anointed successor, developed cold feet when it came to implementing the recommendations of the panel he had set up. Jonathan is following closely on their heels with the anti-democratic zeal of a quintessential sorcerers’ apprentice. Under his watch, elections are fast becoming a do and die affair.

The next mode of terror is economic terror. For some time now, Nigeria has been at the receiving end of a unique form of economic terrorism. First, the technocratic faction of the dominant political elite unleashes half-baked and ill-digested western economic orthodoxies on a helpless and hapless nation. In the ensuing chaos and national disorder, they steal the nation blind together with the dominant political elite joining the stealing frenzy. The bureaucratic faction completes the paper work for them

The result of this epic run on the Exchequer is growing national insolvency. Statutory budgetary allocations are violated. Internal whistleblowers are screaming from the rooftop to no avail. The nation can no longer meet its own self-stated fiscal needs. Pensions are summarily stolen. The budget cannot be balanced. Even the old sleight of hand and World Bank expertise in figure-juggling no longer work. The nation is gradually sliding to fiscal anarchy.

It should be obvious from the foregoing analysis that while these variants of terrorism work alone and on their own, they are often mutually reinforcing and the multiplier effects can be quite damning to national survival. For example, political terrorism requires economic terrorism to flourish. Harsh political regulation must underwrite deregulation and the triumph of the jungle market. Primitive accumulation of economic power requires primitive acquisition of political capital and vice versa.

From another analytical perspective, it should be clear why political and economic terrorism require religious terrorism to complement them. Religious terrorism, which is the next mode of terrorism, is often used to justify economic terrorism and the depletion of scarce national resources. It is boon for those throwing bombs and those disposing of bombs.

Yet religious terrorism remains real enough. The Boko Haram scourge is the most potent threat to Nigeria’s corporate existence since the civil war. If they succeed in Islamising the north, it is goodbye to Nigeria as we know it. Apart from a few aberrations, the modern nation-state is a secular proposition. The idea of a theocratic enclave within a modern nation is a violent contradiction and unworkable anomaly. Yet as the entire north is gradually brought to heels something is bound to give.

Coupling religious terror is ethnic terror. Some mild variants of this virus have always been with us as a logical corollary of the multi-ethnic nation. But ethnic terrorism is on the absolute rise in contemporary Nigeria and it is damaging the Jonathan presidency beyond repairs. Perhaps as a response to the huffing and puffing of the two dominant nationalities, the Ijaw political leadership has gone on a politically naïve binge replete with supremacist sabre rattling.

But it ought to be remembered that the Ijaw as yet do not constitute a power bloc in Nigeria. Jonathan does not belong to either of the two major power blocs. He straddles perilously astride two active political valcanoes. The interesting thing about the Fourth Republic is that its three leading actors till date were thrown up by circumstances beyond the two major power blocs. Ordinarily, this ought to suggest the arrival of a new pan-Nigerian power bloc. But what we have is inchoate and undernourished; a power-driven cartel rather than an authentic power bloc.

It is this Fourth Republic coalescence of disparate and desperate interests that Goodluck Jonathan is about to upset, which may actually be good for Nigeria. In its current form, the Fourth Republic has exhausted its historic and political possibilities. In the coming months, Jonathan and his Ijaw ethnic hegemonists will discover that no ethnic nationality has ever succeeded in holding the nation to ransom. All the ethnic nationalities that have tried this have been humbled at Waterloo, sometimes serially..

The remaining two forms of terror can be described as the rise of counter-hegemonic knowledge and the emergence of the Nigerian educated mob They are also mutually reinforcing. It will take a future essay to explore the contradictions and possibilities of these new forms of terror. Suffice it to say that while four forms of terror, namely judicial, economic, political and ethnic terrorism are directed at the Nigerian nation, the last-mentioned two are directly aimed at the Nigerian state. Religious terror is aimed at both the state and the nation.

In its purest form, counter-hegemonic knowledge is akin to intellectual terrorism. It puts spanners in the work of official mendacity, making governance more arduous and critically challenging. We can see this in the fuel subsidy debate when non-state actors both at home and in the Diaspora tore the government arguments to shreds and took their facts to the cleaners. Their exertions fed and directly led to the first sustained revolt of the educated class in the history of Nigeria such as we witnessed in the first days of January.

It is called the terror congregation and it is this multitude of educated and disaffected people; the déclassé intellectuals, the jobless millions that both Jonathan and General Buhari should fear and placate. Just as the advent of the knowledge society is yielding insight into the hollow vacuity of the state, the rank of the political class is swollen by influx and infiltration by the lower classes. This is double jeopardy and rather than excoriate Buhari for his glimpse into an apocalyptic meltdown, Jonathan should put on his thinking cap. Nigeria is no longer what it used to be. There is a dangerous ferment and terror out there.

Tatalo Alamu, The Nation