Beyond SARS and epistemic disobedience

By Segun Ige

As of now, “Political differences should be resolved at the ballot and not in the streets, and we will keep it that way through this election season and beyond,” Denver Mayor Michael B. Hancock, in a bid to halt the verbal altercation and fatal shooting necessitated by one Matthew Dolloff, 30, cautions impassioned protesters and demonstrators. What does that mean in practice?

It should have been clear by now that the American politics is fraught with systemic discrimination and institutional racism. In particular, the mayor in question is sort of making the gesture that it’s pretty easier, because it would be non-violent, resolving the demagogue of political differences and preacher of epistemic disobediences.

It might be argued that Michael Hancock is hammering and nailing the Trump administration to the cross of turn-the-other-cheek masochism. In short, the November 2020 election would be the mighty moment of political retribution and recognition.

Needless to say, that’s been the ins and outs of Trump’s America. What do we expect? The fact that our political processes have percolated through from, and are patterned after the similitude of, the American “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” doctrine reminds one of the propensity to backslide to the rupture and return of our place amidst diehard white supremacists.

It’s not a surprise, is it, that the Nigerian SARS is seriously steeped in the American architecture of angst police brutalities and bestialities? Oughtn’t the May 25 George Floyd death in Minneapolis have put an end to epic fight-to-finish conflict ensued by the people and people? Yet, again and again, do we hear heart-rending, soul-retching display and discharge of so-called “Antifa” groups, who have been methodically hired to perpetrate unprecedented avoidable mayhem.

Uncritical minds would have ill-digestedly concluded, by the way, with the pointless and perverse impression that SARS is a group of people who have been monochromatically programmed to mete and mount hardship to an exclusively set of people. What do you think? I have been extremely frowning upon the dictum and desideratum of restructuring Nigeria.

Yes, what are we restructuring? A defunct and dysfunctional and deficient police system? No, instead, we should clamour for structuring our political, hence police, system. That’s even if it’s ever ours! Characteristically, Nigeria needs a structure, independently, with which it can conveniently and comfortably govern and lead its people.

The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. The repercussions are what born, and by extension unborn, generations are facing. They’re facing the dire consequences of following the deceivableness of the mater’s will-o’-the-wisp system of leadership to the detriment of the profitable primitive power of nationhood.

Those are the social building blocks of national development that Nigeria has sold simply because of perishable tinsel toys as it were. And yet, we are still insensitive and indefatigable to the warning and calling of nature that it’s time we begin mapping and charting out the course of Nigeria.

Many are of the odium opinion that Nigeria has no future. Think about it, for a while. Nigeria has no future, they say, and even so they want to restructure it. Again, restructure what? Restructure a futureless and directionless country?

That’s a burgeoning abomination I have been witnessing in Nigeria. Those who know the naked truth are still reprehensible in restructuring, to suggest, the structure of another country’s system of governance and leadership. You understand what I’m saying?

That’s what I’m saying: it’s high time Nigeria stopped following the systems and structures of other so-called developed countries hook, line and sinker. And we should begin to have a structure with a Nigerian peculiarity and particularity, and not the horrendous extensive borrowing of a horrible beleaguered democracy.

Country faithful, they are, who have lent eminent voices on restructuring actually do think President Muhammadu Buhari would be conjured to canvass #RestructureNigeria. You see, #EndSARS or #SARSMustEnd already tells us of the all-important fact that Nigeria is similar to baby-Belarus needing foundational fundamental principles of nation growth and skilled leadership.

Yes, leadership by merit – or meritocracy – is really what Nigeria needs, and that should be the burden of proof for these many-are-called-few-are-chosen concerned Nigerians.

If at 60, Nigeria is still suffering from definitional inexactitude, then I think those aforementioned claimers might be right. I quite detest the saying that those who don’t know that they don’t know and don’t want to know are foolish, because able-bodied Nigerians are knowledge-proof and are not ignorant of the ominous webs the country has been entangled and ensconced with. Applied knowledge is therefore of paramount importance. We should not clad ourselves with the regalia of ragbag innuendo of brazen hypocrisy.

In a simple matter-of-fact statement, the epistemic disobediences unleashed, together with the SARS shooting, are not the beginning and ending of police’s perfunctory performatory personalities. That’s been the gene and genealogy of the American aboriginal adamic nature.

That’s the truth. Nigeria, as yet, is stripped and shared by Great Britain and United States. What’s more, it’s like Hong Kong whose destiny used, to say the least, to be decided by China and Great Britain.

Nonetheless, we do hear, every now and then, of the betrayal of China with respect to the partial differentiation and integration of the “one country, two systems” agreements of the 1997 basic law and mini-constitution, particularly as stipulated in the contested national security laws. By default or design, Nigeria is ideologically a child of necessity of the U.K. and the U.S., and we do not appear to be conscious of this crisis of consciousness.

Have we soon been, furthermore, beclouded and beguiled by the superimposition of U.K’s P&ID’s presiding over the Magu case? Surely, that reflects our “in” “dependence” on these possibly relational systems of government I’ve been talking about. It’s a shame, isn’t it, that our judicial systems are juggernauts to justify the verdict of the accused? Truth be told, that’s a gross departure and epistemic disobedience of the fate and faith of the once-benign freedom fighters.

It will be a deliberate sin to debunk the bone and backbone of contention that the Nigeria of today needs a fruitful, favourable federal system of government. Then can we begin to talk about the ‘United States of Nigeria,’ literally.

As the branches cannot bear fruits without the vine, except they abide in the vine, Nigeria should and would be a fruit-bearing branching-tree, whose leaders are so rooted in fertile grounds and grundnorms that they’d begin to bear perennial productive, profitable leaders at the grassroots.

VANGUARD

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