Opinion
The Queen Dies
Published
2 years agoon
By Hope O’Rukevbe Eghagha
It is perhaps one of the sweetest contradictions of our times how Nigerians and indeed Africans as a race, erstwhile victims of British colonial exploitation, rapacious destruction of cultural, religious, and economic heritages have openly celebrated the life and times and mourned the death of the great Elizabeth II Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth Realms. As we now know, London Bridge ‘fell down’ last Thursday when the Supple Lioness of Buckingham and Balmoral Palaces, Defender of the Faith HRM Queen Elizabeth II shed the cloak of earthly beings and danced gloriously into eternity for a well-deserved royal rest after 70 years and 214 days on the arcane and iconic British throne, at the ripe age of 96 years.
Fittingly, The Queen has gone to join her beloved husband of 73 years in the great beyond and they will lie side by side in a designated tomb for the royals, all well meticulously pre-planned even before Prince Phillip left Earth. Great service to the United Kingdom, great service to humanity! We are thankful for the light that her dedicated and exemplary service presented, the healthy line of successors to the British throne despite acts of individuality, and rebellion inspired by the brave new world and the republican spirit of the vivacious Meghan the American actor, wife of Prince Harry!
Why has the world felt so enamoured with the Queen whom most of us never met? Why have ordinary folks across the world expressed such deep emotions about Queen Elizabeth? Did she represent all we would like leaders and rulers to be? Did she embody values eternal which are universal for both autocrats and democrats? Why has the African world forgotten the evil of slavery and colonialism which our encounter with the Caucasian and Arab worlds inflicted on us within a century? Is it the Christian spirit of forgiveness which the missionaries brought to us? What is the import of Desmond Tutu’s ‘When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray’. We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land’ as we examine the life and times of the Great Queen of England?
READ ALSO: Barbados Becomes Republic, Rejects British Queen
The first response is that the Queen is distant in time from the savagery of the colonial greed and exploitation even if she was a sweet beneficiary of the colonial enterprise. The koh-i-Noor diamond set at the front of the Queen’s crown was looted from India, though the British claim that ‘the diamond could not be returned as the Queen received it as part of the Treaty of Lahore, 1849 and is currently in the crown won by the Queen’. To be sure, there are millions of pounds worth of artifacts that grace the righteous Monarchy of Great Britain that we may never know about or have access to!
The outpouring of love for this sweet, genial, friendly, kind, beautiful, always smiling, sweet-voiced white great-grandmother from all over the world was indicative of her personal charm. Certainly not just the throne! Of course in death convention dictates that we shed all ill feelings and say the nicest things ever, even if we didn’t mean them, how the deceased was the best person that ever lived, how without the deceased the world would have come to an end, how we loved them and they loved us despite shortcomings and how we would miss them even if we go off to knock off some bottles of alcohol right after the funeral in acknowledgement of good-riddance-to-bad rubbish!
But in the celebration and mourning of Elizabeth II there was something emotionally deep and true, beyond the façade, beyond the allure of showmanship, and the glamour of TV tears and good behaviour. There is a mystique, a grandness about and deep connection with the Queen of England. The Queen of England! I knew about the Queen of England before my own traditional ruler came into my consciousness. Indeed, anywhere one said, ‘The Queen’, it was invariably construed to refer to Queen Elizabeth. Through rhymes, stories, beautiful, colourful pictures and anecdotes, the elevated status, majesty, and importance of Queen Elizabeth became ingrained in one’s memory, one’s consciousness.
READ ALSO: Tribute To Queen Elizabeth II
Without physical contact, we all felt we knew the Queen, liked her, venerated her. Even highly placed officials felt some nervousness while preparing to meet her. We followed her beautiful story of becoming a monarch by default, her romance, her youthfulness when she ascended the throne of her fathers and took the name of one of her ancestors Elizabeth I. To ascend the British throne at the tender age of 25 years, in a government and social world dominated and controlled by chauvinistic bullish men was no mean feat. And to think that the first PM she met in audience was the Great Winston Churchill tells the story of how she must have managed to navigate the waters of governing the empire and country during her early days on the throne. The Empire was crumbling, with African nations rejecting British rule and fighting for political independence, sometimes brutally as in the conflict between the colonial forces and the Mau Mau Movement in Kenya! The blood of Dedan Kimathi still cries to heaven. That is subject for another day!
For, Britain as we know, was the greatest and most brutal colonial nation in the history of the world. At the peak of British power, she controlled about a quarter of the world’s population and landmass. India, Nigeria, Kenya, Malaya, Ghana, South Africa, Ireland, Palestine, Cyprus, Rhodesia, and Aden were all in the empire on which ‘the sun never set! Although the British claimed to be different from other colonial powers because she was committed to entrenching the rule of law, and social progress, Elkins contends that ‘Britain’s use of systematic violence was no better than that of its rivals. The British were simply skilled in hiding it’. Britain fought with America to keep that new world in her domain and lost. But Nigeria, especially the Bini people will not forget the destruction of Benin Empire after the looting of artifacts and the 1897 deportation of Oba Ovonramwen Nogbaisi to Calabar, because he fought with dignity to protect the honour of his people. Alongside this was control of slavery and the slave trade with its attendant wealth. The wealth of Great Britain was built on the sweat, suffering, and economic resources of the colonies.
READ ALSO: Britain’s Queen Elizabeth Dies At 96
Queen Elizabeth was a beneficiary of a rapacious and dominating empire, even if unwittingly. By the time she took the throne however, the code of engagement was somehow more subdued. In a way, Queen Elizabeth served in the century of the common monarch if I may borrow the expression from Malcolm Muggeridge, the century when the monarchy descended from the high horse of infinite power and majesty and subjected themselves to the modern power and dictates of democracy. For before the 1848 revolutions in Europe and before the 20th century, it was inconceivable for the British monarch to share power with the common people.
That common and personal touch to the monarchy was brought on by the Queen Elizabeth, a queen of destiny and freshness. Picture for one moment what the course of history would have been had the young Queen decided to assert the power of the throne in the traditional way in 1952!
One could say that open hostile questions and interrogations about the relevance of the monarchy persist though anti-monarchy forces will not have their way on abolition, at least not soon. As Muggeridge argues, ‘the British monarchy took a different course. Instead of effacement, what befell it was exposure; just as the new communists states called themselves people’s democracies, it became a people’s monarchy, with full media support and cooperation’.
So, Queen Elizabeth was a great woman who carried herself with dignity, affection, native intelligence and commonsense. It is our hope that someday, the British throne would return the looted diamond to India, reparations for slavery of Africans, and compensate the exploited peoples of the world. Queen Elizabeth, it is true she stumbled along the line. Who wouldn’t in seventy years in a particular position of power and majesty? As we bid the great Queen goodbye, we hope and believe that her successor who has been groomed for the throne will continue the tradition of service to humanity and that as Long live the Queen fulfilled in the life of Queen Elizabeth, Long live the King will be the portion of King Charles II.
Professor Eghagha can be reached on 08023220393 or heghagha@yahoo.com
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By Hope O’Rukevbe Eghagha
One of the interesting proverbs I picked up in our General African Studies (GAS 201) course with the late Professor Jabez Olowo Ojoade in the University of Jos in 1979 was ‘it is a bastard child that points at his homestead with his left hand! The Akan people of Ghana put it this way: a bastard child points to his father’s house with his left hand’. The Yoruba say that ‘a person who points to their homestead with the left hand is not a good person’, while the Luhya of Kenya say that ‘when pointing to your village, use your right hand’. It is in the Swahili language that a sort of generalised use of the left hand is concretised when it says ‘the left hand is for personal hygiene, not for pointing!
Bastard child! Homestead! Pointing with the left hand! These three constituents and functional parts of the proverb tickled my teenage imagination to no end. What is it about the left had that it should not be used to refer to one’s family? Why is this metaphor common across the continent? Indeed, there must be something about the family, about the homestead, about one’s origins that deserves respect no matter the circumstances.
By the way, some Nigerians in the diaspora also point to Nigeria with their left hand. ‘That country’, is often used to describe the place where some spent eighteen or thirty of their lives as they tried to find their feet. So, in a sense, Kemi is simply doing what some full-blooded Nigerians do in reaction to the anomie which currently rules the land. Kemi stands out because of her delicate and prominent position in the world. We all took offence when Bully Donald Trump referred to ours as ‘shithole countries! At that level, who said what becomes very important, that is, the message is given prominence because of the stature and calibre of the messenger.
The proverb, according to Wikipedia, is ‘often used to convey that someone who is not respectful or grateful to their roots or heritage will eventually be rejected or ostracised by their community! The left hand, we are told, is for personal hygiene. We don’t use it to give or receive gifts; we don’t use it to serve drinks or for traditionally important functions.
In the African context, a bastard child is not one who was born out of wedlock or whose father is not known to the family. Bastard child represents a person who is disconnected from their family. Pointing to the family house with the left hand is indicative of disrespect.
These thoughts flooded my mind when I read recently elected leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, Kemi Badenoch, gave some hard and bad knocks to Nigeria, the Nigeria Police, and governance in her Nigeria, her ancestral home. To be sure, nobody who has encountered some men of the Nigeria Police in action can fault Kemi. Her chemistry of being brutally frank is what has taken Kemi to the heights in Conservative Party politics. Whether she can indeed lead the Party to victory in an election is a different kettle of fish. As the potential leader of the British government, all cards will count when push gets to shove. Which is why Kemi should remember that no well-trained child points to the family house with the left hand.
Nigeria is in process. It is a building site. And we started this project of disparate and different cultures fused together when the British pounced on our ancestors to create Nigeria. We look back to the years when a British monarch, King Henry VIII (1491 to 1547), who ate two of his six wives for breakfast and dinner. Wives Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard were executed by beheading. Jane Seymour died under mysterious circumstances. Perhaps if Diana had emerged in the 15th century as wife to a British monarch, the reigning king would have sent her to the guillotine instead of the tunnel in Paris! Some British monarchs actively participated, supported, and profited from the transatlantic slave trade. British monarchs oversaw the colonisation of indigenous lands in Africa, North America, and Australia sometimes through genocide! No where in Africa, our dear left-handed and grandly insolent Kemi, would a Prime Minister allow his wife to remain in an adulterous relationship for decades as Harold Macmillan did with wife Lady Dorothy Macmillan did with the bisexual Bob Boothby in the 20th Britain!
We may need to remind Kemi that racism still dominated policing in Britain as it does in much of the Western world. Yet, we have not painted the entire police system as being racist. Indeed, Kemi, without officialdom around her can still be profiled by a police officer if she were found driving alone in some areas of London! Her skin colour, is not typically British, I dare say. Yet, we have not said that Britain is racist. The ‘how dark’ racist discussions which precipitated Harry and Meghan fleeing the British monarchy is still very fresh and raw in our consciousness; yet, Nigeria’s Vice President has not called the British monarchy a racist institution.
Time will fail me to discuss the Damilola Taylor case in year 2000 when the Metropolitan Police handling of Taylor’s murder was seen as slow and inadequate due to racial bias. By the way, Damilola was both British and Yoruba like our illustrious and petulant Kemi who believes in giving hard knocks! What about the Stephen Lawrence 1993 murder case which the Metropolitan Police badly handled owing to racial bias? In 1999, Roger Sylvester, a Black man, died in police custody and an inquest showed that the police used excessive force. In 2009, newspaper vendor Ian Tom died after being struck by a police officer during the G20 protests in London. The 1999 Macpherson Report, which investigated the Stephen Lawrence case, concluded that ‘the Metropolitan Police as institutionally racist! As late as 2017, the Lammy Review which was led David Lammy (MP) concluded that “black and minority ethnic individuals were more likely to be stopped and searched, arrested, and imprisoned than their white counterparts! Need I say more?
So, our dear daughter and bright star Kemi in the British firmament, we shall not point to you with our left hand, because in spite of you, you are our daughter. We can only say that the Nigeria Police is in good company of the Empire of the Police system which was created in 1820 by your progenitors from the other side! Colonial vestiges are not easy to shake off!
Opinion
Afe Babalola And Dele Farotimi: On Justice, A Just Society And The Nigerian State
Published
11 hours agoon
December 22, 2024By Tunji Olaopa
The feud between elder statesman, Chief Afe Babalola and civil rights activist, Mr. Dele Farotimi, is perhaps the most significant discourse that postcolonial Nigerian state has thrown up for the moment, one in a class of those grand defining disputations that surely will gather dust which will take some time to abate. And it is one case that is fraught with all sorts of legal, jurisprudential, moral and political traps and complexities that speak to more than the trivial interventions—leveraged around the David and Goliath motif—that are attending the matter. Those who have been able to go beyond the surface of the case will agree that it goes to the very foundation and founding of the Nigerian society, and the fundamental objective of crafting a good and just society for Nigerians. That the issue revolves around the dispensation of justice immediately alerts us to the deep insinuation about the idea of social justice itself, and how the conception of fairness could be written into the very fabric of the Nigerian society. And yet, the complexity of the case is what makes it a case that is too critical for a public servant like me to dabble in.
(Un)fortunately, my intellectual maturation, my political science education and my professional endeavor in institutional reform advocacy have prepared me to intervene in this critical matter. I have always been involved with Nigeria, and with reflective thoughts about how to reconstitute her greatness. Three learning encounters with three world-historic icons configured my passion for wanting to see that Nigeria becomes a state we all can be proud of. The first came from my reading of Plato’s Republic. There is a reason that the entire treatise commenced with the question, what is justice? Justice was a fundamental issue in the decline of the ancient Athenian democracy that allowed Socrates to be judicially murdered. The second learning derived from Wole Soyinka’s dense prison memoir, The Man Died. And like most who have read it, Soyinka was troubled by the idea of justice: “For me, justice is the first condition of humanity.” By the time I would be coming to Thomas More’s Utopia, I was already apprised of the connections between my political science education, my professional endeavor as a public servant, and the key elements of institutional reform as a cogent framework for transforming Nigeria.
From Plato to Soyinka, we have a trajectory of political reflection that takes justice seriously as the basis for organizing a just society. This is part of the intellectual frameworks for my undergraduate and graduate studies at the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan. In one of those explosive seminar classes that played some fundamental role in my intellectual maturation in the graduate school, I had proposed an argument through a seminar paper titled: “Is a revolution an option to fix Nigeria?” The topic was meant to titillate the collective yearning for revolution that would serve as the ultimate mechanism for social change that would flush off all traces of corruption and degeneration in postcolonial Nigeria. Revolutions seem to possess some allure for the masses because they constitute a framework of justice that the constitutional justice mechanism might not be able to handle.
However, as Wole Soyinka, Thomas More, Martin Luther and even Galileo Galilei would realize, the need for radicalism is balanced by the force of establishment orthodoxy. The Nigerian predicament has, as a fundamental foundation, a lot to do with the connection between governance failure and injustice in terms of the persistent and protracted class strife between the haves and the have-nots, between the rich and the poor, indeed, in the final analysis between the government and the governed. And in the case between Afe Babalola and Dele Farotimi, the issues boil down to the administration of justice and the entire edifices and institutions of social justice and the rule of law in Nigeria. And so, in outlining the key issues involved in the matter, we must be careful enough to read between the lines and the noises of analysts who are eager to queue behind their favored protagonists.
First things first. Let us remove the surface debris. Indeed, and in this case, the debris points us in the direction to look for the rot within the matter. First, there is the matter of civil defamation and its legal ramifications. And second, there is the issue of the legal and moral protocols involved in dealing with the pursuit of redress by someone who knows and understands the law. Barrister Farotimi has a legal right to seek redress in court. Chief Babalola has a legal right to defend his reputation in court. In raising the specter of legal prosecution against defamation, I see Chief Babalola as being at the forefront of gatekeeping the legal establishment in terms of what is and is not permissible or possible under the law and its conservative tenets. If you are hurt or an injustice has been done to your person, then the best place to seek redress is not the court of public opinion but the constitutional legal establishment.
Unfortunately for him, Barrister Farotimi’s book, Nigeria and Its Criminal Justice System, impugns the entire legal and judicial establishment up to its apex institution, the Nigerian Supreme Court. However, does radicalism preclude moral decency? A book could be written and allegations made without the complement of atrocious language. Or maybe the rot in the judicial system, and the need for a revolution preclude any niceties, especially with those who are allegedly at the forefront of perpetuating and protecting the rot. But then, how to prove what we all consider to be the norm in terms of legal prosecution of judicial corruption remains a hanging question.
No matter how we look at what we are calling the surface debris, we are redirected deeper and deeper into what lies beneath the surface. The ultimate question is that between Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi, what we are asked to contend with is the state of the Nigerian judiciary and the corrupt impediment of social justice, especially for an average Nigerian. What Barrister Dele Farotimi said about the Nigerian judicial system is not new. We are all familiar with the rot within the system. Indeed, this is not the first time an alarm would be raised about what we are all familiar with. Indeed, as far back as 1999, The News magazine carried a most unsalutary headline, “Crooks on the Bench: An Expose on the Rot in the Judiciary.” The magazine headlined the names of 47 judges indicted for judicial corruption. What is new is that Dele Farotimi dared to go so far as to mention specific names, and to confront the big players in the legal establishment. And he did this in a most scurrilous manner targeted at getting maximum traction and attention. It is as if Mr Farotimi, through the public sphere, is throwing the gauntlet to every Nigerian and challenging us on our collective responsibility to clean the Augean stable.
If Barrister Farotimi cannot prove his allegations in court, it would not mean that his charges are false. It might only imply that the system which is supposed to guarantee justice has become too corruptly dense to achieve its mandate. But there is also the chance that since the entire judicial system cannot be tarred so broadly with the same brush, Farotimi’s allegation might receive a dispassionate hearing that might deliver justice as we expect it. This might be a tall expectation. Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament has inevitable consequences on the capacity of the judicial system to facilitate the delivery of justice. And this failure also complicates the capacity of the Nigerian state to deliver on its social contract to Nigerians. This is what makes the Babalola-Farotimi case too complex to be decided either in the constitutional court or the court of public opinion. The burdens of postcolonial disruptions that the Nigerian judiciary system carries are enormous: judicial corruption, miscarriage of judgments, executive lawlessness, delayed trial due to insufficient infrastructure, financial dependence on the executive arm of government.
To outline the fundamental challenges of the judicial system in Nigeria this way is not to give in to cynicism and a deterministic mindset that we might be caught in a vice that is inescapable. It is simply to say that the ongoing uproar between the two dramatis personae demonstrates that the court has been given a chance to reflect on the role that (in)justice plays in the fundamental understanding of the Nigerian postcolonial predicament and the capacity of a democratic system to correct itself. When Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi are given their day in court, we will have no choice but to trust that same judicial system to deliver unbiased judgment no matter our misgivings about how objective and untainted that judgment could be. This is just a way of saying that though our judicial system is not perfect; it is still the best that we have.
The last words on this reflection on the connection between the ongoing feud between Babalola and Farotimi and Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament must be given to Haile Sellasie, former emperor of Ethiopia: “Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”
Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission,Abuja, and Professor of Public Administration.
tolaopa2003@gmail.com
By Leo Igwe
The Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW) is concerned over the reported arrest of two men accused of being ‘witchdoctors’ in Zambia. The arrest underscores the potency of witchcraft fears and the connection between occult anxieties and the country’s politics. These individuals were accused of trying to bewitch the Zambian president, Hakainde Hichilema. The police claimed that they had charms. They planned to use the charms to harm the president. The report says the two persons have been charged under Zambia’s Witchcraft Act. The Act criminalizes “possession of charms”, “professing knowledge of witchcraft”, and “cruelty to wild animals”. The police found the two with assorted charms, including a live chameleon.
This development is utterly embarrassing and shows that the Zambian government is slowly losing its focus and bearing.The country has many socio-economic challenges. Suspicion of bewitchment or possession of charms should be the least of its worries at this time. There should be no place for witchcraft and possession of charms in modern politics because there is no evidence for these beliefs and practices. Zambian authorities should not weaponize the Witchcraft Act or use it to justify this incident. Zambian law does not recognize witchcraft. Zambia’s Witchcraft Act criminalizes naming or imputing witchcraft. It prohibits accusing or threatening to accuse any person of being a witch or a wizard. In this case, it is the police who are breaking the law.
Otherwise, how did they know the two individuals were ‘witchdoctors’? Did these persons identify as witch doctors? If not, the police are liable because they named and imputed witchcraft and have to prove that these individuals have witch-doctoring powers. The police claimed to have charged these individuals for possessing “assorted charms”, including a chameleon. Really?
The police in Zambia have questions to answer: What are charms? How did they know that what was in their possession were charms, not pets? Is a chameleon a form of charm? What makes possession of a chameleon possession of a charm? When and how does a chameleon become a charm? The police need to answer these questions and more before one takes them seriously.
Again, did the individuals describe what was in possession as ‘charms’? If they did, does confessing or designating something as a charm make it a charm? And if they did not, the police are liable because they need to prove how those possessions translated into charms.
In addition, the police claimed that the duo wanted to bewitch the president. What does that mean? How did they know? Are the police not contravening a provision under the Witchcraft Act by professing knowledge of witchcraft? Can one harm another person using a chameleon? They claimed that the two persons wanted to use the charms in their possession, including the chameleon to harm the president. How did they know that? What is the evidence for that?
The Advocacy for Alleged Witches calls for an end to this state-sponsored witch hunt. There is no evidence of harm through witchcraft or charms. The Zambian government should desist from witchcraft- related infractions and violations including arbitrary arrest, and detention of innocent citizens. These allegations are baseless and absurd. The arrest was politically motivated. This development demonstrates that Zambian authorities are out of sync with their duty and obligation to uphold the rule of law and protect accused persons.
Zambian authorities need to act in compliance with the 2021 UN resolution, which urged states to take measures to combat abuses linked to witchcraft beliefs and ritual attacks. End witchcraft allegations in Zambia. End witch hunts in Africa now!
Dr Igwe directs the Advocacy for Alleged Witches.
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