The Nation Newspaper

Those who refuse to learn from the past will learn to relive its horrors. Institutional memory has been completely vaporized in contemporary Nigeria.

As it has been noted by many scholars, the paradox of social capital is that the more you expend it wisely, the more its net worth and network increase. If the capacity of Nigerians for swift recovery is just short of the miraculous, the inability to profit from past experience is equally legendary. Unless Nigeria’s legendary luck intervenes and offers us a dramatic reprieve, the institutional chaos of postcolonial Nigeria and its dire wages are likely to haunt the nation in the coming months. But this is why in any country worth its salt, it is only those who pass the grueling test of physical, psychological and mental stamina that are found appointable to the highest bench in the land. Their lordships betrayed their own psychological unease by resorting to open tantrums and jaided jeremiads unworthy of the highest altar of justice in the land. Trapped between the political mob outside howling for justice and the executive mobsters bent on interpreting the rule of law according to their whims and fantasies, one can appreciate the plight and predicament of the apex court. Perhaps in the charged and explosive atmosphere, it was the wisest and most judicious thing to do. After their first baptism of hell fire in the hands of the modern masters of savage destruction during the naval bombardment of Lagos in 1851 and 1861, the Yoruba people chose to record their experience for posterity in the figure of speech known as onomatopoeia. The contraption bequeathed to us by Lord Fredrick Lugard is still in dire need of a fundamental reset. The old order had indeed ended and a new one in was in place. Akarabata is a Modakeke suburb of the ancient and historic town of Ile-Ife which witnessed considerable carnage and destruction during the last, and hopefully the very last, eruption of internecine warfare between warring communities of ancient brothers and sisters. Perhaps this is what makes denizens of the postcolonial pandemonium often feel totally invincible and oblivious of gravity.