NigeriansTalk

These days when­ever you walk into a bar, you are almost always cer­tain peo­ple will be watch­ing or argu­ing foot­ball, Euro­pean. The debate on the soc­cer­coloni­sa­tion of Niger­ian youth con­scious­ness is more or less fore­gone. But the tragic thing is that vir­tu­ally all infor­mal dis­cur­sive space has been insid­i­ously com­pro­mised because of this col­lec­tive hys­te­ria for Euro­pean foot­ball. I mean when was the last time you wit­nessed a seri­ous socio-political debate at a bar, a vendor’s stand, a bus stop? Yet these are a use­ful, national cul­ture of street par­lia­men­tary: vibrant, move­able con­fabs enriched with diverse imag­i­na­tion and admixed on highly informed com­men­tary, shrill sen­ti­men­tal­i­ties, une­d­u­cated but some­times imag­i­na­tive con­jec­tures and some­times near– accu­rate mythol­o­giz­ing. These forums, reserved largely for those who do not usu­ally have access to avenues of dis­course like the news­pa­per and the inter­net, are now been endan­gered by a tenac­ity of ‘a sin­gle story’- the Euro­pean football.

Even when the pres­i­dent has been absent– some say miss­ing– for more than 50 days; even when the leg­is­la­ture seems grounded in timid idiocy; even when the Fed­eral Cab­i­net is hushed in cul­tic embrace of crim­i­nal­ity watch­ing, as the nation is reduced to aspi­ra­tions of 4 or 5 indi­vid­u­als led by the First Lady but cheer-led by the ever conso­ci­ated min­is­ter of jus­tice, we stick to our for­eign pas­sion. And you would have thought the attempted bomb­ing by cit­i­zen Farouk of a plane over the USA would have caused a solemn break, how­ever brief, from soc­cer frenzy, to rumi­nate on human ele­ments of our sys­temic col­lapse. No. On 26th of Decem­ber, the day after the inci­dent that shocked the whole world, my peo­ple were still seen at the bar and other places dis­cussing stale vic­to­ries and losses of for­eign leagues .Maybe they could not be both­ered. Maybe foot­ball offers a kind of ther­apy, an escape, from the sor­did real­i­ties around them. What more, it is bet­ter to lav­ish your emo­tive resources on a thrilling, sen­su­ally pleas­ing spec­ta­cle of foot­ball than waste them on impas­sioned com­men­tary on the polity, which will not reduce the sub­scrip­tion fee of the cable net­works. Even an a-soccer cynic like me allows a glance or two, once in a while, for the kinetic spec­ta­cle of the round leather game.

That was what I was think­ing, nurs­ing a lone bot­tle, last night at a bar in Ilorin, Kwara State, when some­one shouted at some­one else, amidst a rather fren­zied foot­ball argu­ment, to shut up and stop behav­ing like Mutal­lab. There was a momen­tary ces­sa­tion of the babelling, I sup­posed a lot of peo­ple had not heard what pre­ceded the men­tion­ing of the name, and within like 20 sec­onds ‚eyes passed from face to face until all heads turned to the owner of the voice; he apolo­get­i­cally shrugged and said qui­etly, I mean fanatic. I could have sworn I saw a momen­tary fear in his eyes, a moment before voices rose again. I took a good look at this guy, he looked like a banker that had come to the bar straight from work– tie and all. Prob­a­bly not a Mus­lim in a town pre­pon­der­antly Mus­lim, he could have realised at that sus­pended moment, that there was no way to gauge what peo­ple in Ilorin thought of Mutal­lab and his action.

Yes, we know a larger sec­tion of world Mus­lims frown at ter­ror­ism and that many gov­ern­ments in Arab world are par­tic­i­pat­ing in the global effort to rid the world of Islamic ter­ror­ism, but when we have a respected local opin­ion shaper like Mohammed Haruna remind­ing us why Abdul­mu­tal­lab was pos­si­ble in the con­text of Amer­i­can hege­mony and mur­der­ous inter­fer­ence in the polit­i­cal econ­omy of many a Arab coun­try, we could not be sure that we, as a nation, col­lec­tively con­demn Mutallab’s idi­otic adven­ture. Haruna, writ­ing in The Nation, reminded us that US’s self-serving for­eign poli­cies, pow­ered by her inter­ests in Big Oil in the Arab nations, which have seen crim­i­nal inva­sions of Arab coun­tries and killing of thou­sands in the process made, global ter­ror­ism pos­si­ble. This is not a new argu­ment, yet Haruna ded­i­cated two columns, two weeks, to tell us how Amer­i­can eco­nomic impe­ri­al­ism in the Mid­dle East has con­tin­ued to crim­i­nalise Islamic beliefs and prac­tices, there­fore mak­ing peo­ple like Mutal­lab take to ter­ror as a weapon of protest. One would have thought, killing of inno­cent pas­sen­gers on board, some of whom might be mus­lims, would not have led to evac­u­a­tion of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. But then, the state­ment would have been made, wouldn’t it? And if other Mus­lims had per­ished in that plane, one can­not be too sure of their chances in the after-life, even if one con­ceded Mutal­lab his eter­nal bliss of mul­ti­ple vir­gins, as they might not think of them­selves as fight­ing any holy war.

But Haruna was right; and he would have been more so if it had hap­pened that Mutal­lab had taken Yemeni cit­i­zen­ship before his mis­ad­ven­ture. His mis­ad­ven­ture would have been a mere shock to us rather than the cat­a­strophic dimen­sion it has now taken, if he had renounced his Niger­ian cit­i­zen­ship before board­ing that plane. Nige­ri­ans are not all Mus­lims and we might not all share in the Islamist roman­ti­cism and sense of injus­tice that inspired young Mutal­lab, but now we are all going to be told to step out of line and be strip-searched at air­ports all over the world; we are all going to be pun­ished for politico-religious con­vic­tions of an impres­sion­able young man. There is noth­ing sen­si­ble for any Niger­ian, even if mus­lim, to fight an Arab war at our col­lec­tive expense.

These are things we expect pub­lic com­men­ta­tors like Mal­lam Haruna to address. Many enlight­ened Nige­ri­ans– mus­lim or Chris­t­ian (like the enlight­ened Amer­i­can com­men­ta­tors that Haruna copi­ously quoted)- are aware of and sym­pa­thetic with the colos­sal injus­tice going on in the Mid­dle East for instance, but we still object to these things erupt­ing unwar­ranted vio­lence in our coun­try. So we expect pub­lic com­men­ta­tors, when they ques­tion America’s rea­son for includ­ing Nige­ria in the list, to remem­ber that we have always lived with such extrem­ist ten­den­cies in Nige­ria. Amer­ica over­re­acted, yes, but we are also known to have over­re­acted more than once when we decided to slaugh­ter peo­ple for hold­ing dif­fer­ent reli­gious views. Ter­ror­ism need not be tar­geted at the US, need not be global, to be deemed so; the rou­tine mas­sacres that occur in Kano and Kaduna and a lot more north­ern cities in the name of reli­gion and eth­nic­ity are ter­ror­ism. Remem­ber the recent Bokom Haram atavism. Yet unlike global ter­ror­ism, there is nobody to be held respon­si­ble, to be pros­e­cuted, no coun­try to be bombed– a case of unknown Yank­aba, I guess. And do we really think the lit­tle Jihads that dot­ted home land­scape did not con­tribute to Mutal­lab pro­found igno­rance and his fan­tasy of Islamic millennium?

Let us not be so both­ered in locat­ing Mutal­lab geog­ra­phy and psy­chol­ogy of influ­ences in his for­eign edu­ca­tion, his exis­ten­tial lone­li­ness, his back­ground of priv­i­lege. Let us be both­ered more by the ruina­tion of Niger­ian body politic. As Prince­ton Lyman pointed out, Niger­ian has been decon­structed by its inter­nal con­tra­dic­tions. Cor­rup­tion and bad lead­er­ship have con­tin­u­ally made project Nige­ria a still birth; our sul­lied inter­na­tional pro­file has taken another feather of ignominy– thanks to Mutal­lab: we are done f or. Let’s not even start to won­der if Mutal­lab was Ghana­ian, would Amer­i­can include Ghana in the ter­ror­ism list. No!, they would not: Ghana, despite her siz­able mus­lim pop­u­la­tion is not known for vio­lent extrem­ism. Ghana has shown com­mit­ment to sus­tain­able democ­racy, forward-looking eco­nomic plan­ning and lead­er­ship that is ready to work with peo­ple in mind. Besides, Ghana­ian pres­i­dent would have con­tacted Pres­i­dent Obama imme­di­ately for res­o­lu­tion after the failed ter­ror­ist attempt, but we don’t even have a gov­ern­ment in place. So how much dif­fer­ent are we from Soma­lia that we object to shar­ing pride of place with on that list? When we get our acts together and resolve the avoid­able implo­sions of our national struc­ture through good gov­er­nance, we might not need to shout our­selves hoarse before Nige­ria, as an inter­na­tional brand, becomes cred­i­ble again.

Back to my bar moment: There could be a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion in the tag of Mutal­lab that the gen­tle­man put on his overzeal­ous inter­locu­tor. Foot­ball is a game of extreme pas­sion, fierce faith, dog­matic com­mit­ment, irra­tional belief. Have I described a reli­gious tem­per? Yes, foot­ball can take on reli­gious expe­ri­ence and it has recorded its own bloody his­tory all over the world, hasn’t it? And if Mohammed Haruna can deploy Mutallab’s action as metaphor for lib­er­at­ing impulses, why couldn’t our man equally see the zeal­ous­ness of this fanatic fan of an Eng­lish team in such terms? My thoughts couldn’t have been more beer-sodden, could they?