The Rise of Homo Nigerianus

Tatalo Alamu

From the volcanic meltdown of Nigeria in the past fortnight has emerged a unique species: Homo Nigerianus.  Homo Nigerianus has been long in coming. He does not speak Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba and does not partake in any of Nigeria’s multi-lingual riot of possibilities. He has been delinked from linguistic communion. His lingo is inarticulate rage which he spews out in sharp, stuttering and spluttering cadences of equal opportunity violence.

Social prophets predicted his arrival on the scene. Long before he was hatched like a monster animal in the fetid and festering bowel of harsh inequity that is modern post-Independence Nigeria, early precursors have been making some sneak appearance.  Homo Nigerianus is a product of complete de-socialization; a haunting throwback to the primitive caveman of human antiquity where wild men roamed the wild forests hunting for what to eat.

Like the old African savages in Joseph Conrad’s infamous novel, The Heart of Darkness, whose skills of communication never went beyond “catch am, kill am” or “Mr Kurtz he dead”, the linguistic ability of Homo Nigerianus is pared down to the barest minimum mode of self-expression. A fortnight ago upon sighting edibles in a warehouse that had been prised open by bare knuckles, Homo Nigerianus brayed: “See food!”

This is what happens when humanity has been reduced to the most feral level of existence, a condition which echoes the darker stages of the hunter-gatherer epoch of history. It is a Hobbesian hell; a state of nature in which everything is short, nasty and brutish. It is eat or be eaten alive. Beyond the common foraging for food, there is no solidarity of purpose. What is looted is easily re-looted and what is stolen is briskly stolen again.

How did a modern Nigerian society regress this far to the infancy of humanity? It has been said that humankind first civilized in Africa, but it has not continued to do so there. Like the rest of the world, Africa has also known great civilizations, mighty empires, notable kingdoms, remarkable city-states and globally recognized trading emporiums that date back to the Babylonian epoch.

But beginning from the thirteenth century African witnessed a steep decline. The people and their societies became very vulnerable to emergent European powers and Arab marauders that laid siege to them from greater Arabia. Portugal, Holland, France, Germany and Britain conquered and subjugated huge swathes of the continent while newly created Belgium was waiting in the wings.

The unending nightmare and humiliation culminated in the Berlin Conference of 1884/85 when the continent was parcelled out among the contending European powers. This was not just conquest in the ordinary sense of the word. It was conquest accompanied by a systematic political, economic, intellectual, spiritual and cultural annihilation in which a people and continent already at the end of its wits lost their organic essence.

To appreciate the colossal scale of depredation, the old Kongo kingdom whose entire inhabitants had been transported as slaves through the new slave port of Luanda underwent three different types of colonial rationalizations: Portuguese, French and Belgian. With its extant traditional institutions destroyed and the new colonial replacements stymied by host rejection, Africa became a land of anomic normlessness.

In such circumstances, it ought to have been obvious to the generation of African leaders involved in the independence struggle for Africa that to make a dent on the global scene, the nations inherited from the colonial masters had to be reinvented and forced to undergo a drastic reconfiguration in order to be able to stand up on their own. The colonial nation was not designed for Africans.

Those African leaders who grasped this imperative necessity for a comprehensive overhaul of the ticking time-bombs gingerly placed on their laps such as Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, Obafemi Awolowo, Eduardo Mondlane, Augustino Neto and Samora Michel were either destroyed or prevented from coming to power. Post-colonial Africa is a blood-splattered canvas indeed.

It is a tragic pity that Nigeria which has been touted as the Black person’s last hope and the potential Mecca of the Black race as a result of its humongous size and spectacular endowments in natural and human resources has failed to live up to its historic billing.

After a costly civil war, several coups, civil uprisings, religious upheavals, organized banditry which has devastated the north central states and an on-going sectarian insurrection which has lasted eleven years, Nigeria is bleeding on all fronts. The nation has been in traumatic transition since independence.

In a strange irony, the post-military epoch seems to have sharply accentuated the debacle. Nigeria suffers from a double jeopardy. Military rule brought neither accelerated development nor national cohesion while civil rule has failed to throw up an organic and nationalist political class capable of squarely addressing the grave national problems.

With its economy devastated by a crippling war bill, dwindling revenues due to a mono-cultural dependence on oil, open mismanagement of resources, graft and spellbinding corruption in all arms of government, Nigeria’s woes have been critically compounded by the post-Covid-19 realities.

As a result of a run on the national currency due to state larceny and pressure on the external reserves, stagflation, which is a combination of rising prices and low purchasing power reigns supreme causing untold hardship to many Nigerian homes. With unemployment among the vibrant and energetic youth running at an all-time high, it is not a question of low purchasing power for the youngsters but no purchasing power.

With such a plethora of negative forces tugging at the national underbelly, no state diviner can predict when the tipping point would be reached. This is the fate that overtook Nigeria in the last fortnight.

Against a background of increasing despair and general impoverishment, the steep increase in the price of petroleum and the punitive tariff on electricity seemed to have pushed the public to a point of no return. The EndSARS protest against police brutality was just a pretext for a more massive social upheaval.

Enter Homo Nigerianus. Homo Nigerianus was not part of the EndSARS movement. On his own he could not articulate any social grievances and neither does he have the social clout or group cohesion to lead any mass protest. Only the articulate can call out the articulated. It was a case of the tail wagging the dog.

Homo Nigerianus does not belong to any social class. He cannot even be classified as belonging to an underclass. Classes are distinct social categories with their own unique identity. Being the wretched of the most wretched, hoodlums are declasse and unclassifiable.

The EndSARS protest people were leaderless by choice. The hoodlums were leaderless by vocation or lack of it. Criminal gangs have kingpins. But who ever heard of the leader of hoodlums?  Hoodlums are an amorphous mass distinguished by the brutality of dumb resentment against a system that has completely dehumanized them.

Drawn mainly from the rump of Nigeria’s old middle class and the emergent entertainment aristocracy, the EndSARS movement had no commonality or mutuality with Homo Nigerianus on the prowl. But the genuine protesters saw their nemesis too late in the day until it was ready to side line or steamroll them as the case may be.

Homo Nigerianus has now arrived on the scene fully dressed or fully undressed as the case may be. The genie is already out of the bottle and cannot be put back. Unlike the more disciplined proletariat of yore, the more class conscious artisan groups and peasant formations, Homo Nigerianus cannot be enlisted for revolutionary rousing or progressive politics.

But as we have seen, it will always be available where looting, anarchic mayhem and arson are being contemplated on a vast scale. The apocalyptic nightmare we have witnessed in the last fortnight will be a child’s play if we were to witness a repeat performance.

That encore may not be long in coming if nothing is urgently done to contain the menace. The hostile, inhuman postcolonial state that has spawned the monstrosity will have to give way to allow Nigeria to be made anew. As a first step, our sprawling anarchic metropolis, particularly Lagos, which are nothing but conglomerations of urban chaos will have to be urgently depopulated.

It is either we are going to be dragged into modernity or we choose to remain in our current neither-zone until it gets to us. A modern mega-city without a metro system, adequate sanitation, dwelling quarters, civic centres and a polite and people-friendly security service can only produce the type of dehumanized denizens that have been on rampage in our cities in the past fortnight.

Lagos needs federal help which will transform it into a fully functioning megalopolis and revive its shattered infrastructure. As a federal policy, there is an urgent need to revive the whole idea of satellite suburbia which will release our besieged cities from their current claustrophobic confines and drain them of their poisonous influx.

The whole concept of farm settlements, out of city hubs for emerging technologies, auto-polis, aero-malls etc can be fundamentally rethought and adapted to the needs of an emerging Third World economic power-house. However much we hate Chief Obafemi Awolowo as an avatar of emancipatory politics we can at least borrow from his brilliant Keynesian ruminations about redistribution of public wealth and amelioration of poverty.

This year has been quite momentous for Nigeria. Nobody could have predicted its unhappy trajectory at the beginning. Covid-19 emerged from nowhere to place the economy in acute jeopardy. As if this was not enough, the legitimate, well-organized but profoundly naïve EndSARS movement prepared the ground for the emergence of Homo Nigerianus who promptly incinerated the nation.

The monster we birthed has become a full grown hoodlum roaming the length and breadth of the country like an apocalyptic demon. He does not believe in anything or anybody for that matter. Having grown up in Nigeria’s vast orphanage of political and economic inequities, the hoodlums no longer speak our language. Like all nihilists, and with due to apologies to Oscar Wilde, Homo Nigerianus knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

His driving motive is sheer wilful destructiveness which is borne out of implacable social malice. But because he lacks both group solidarity and revolutionary cunning, he will be easily apprehended and neutralised by a police force buoyed and energised by group resentment and professional solidarity after being briefly overwhelmed. But like mosquitoes, they will continue to proliferate until the pond of filth that spawns them is drained.

We are very lucky that this time around that the police chose to abscond rather than join them. We have said it several times in this column that as long as we pretend to be paying the police, the police will pretend to be watching over us until some epochal event comes along to shatter the illusion of order. Next time around, the police having lost all illusions may be tempted to join. That will be real Armageddon.

We can only avoid this looming disaster if the rate of social absorption of the hoodlums through their economic rehabilitation outpaces their growth rate. For a society facing a drastic economic decline, this is going to be a tall order.

But there is no other way. Just as it amounts to sheer economic illiteracy to believe you can lift people out of poverty without economic production outpacing population growth, it is nothing but political delusion to believe that we have heard the last from Homo Nigerianus.

Thenationonlineng