Class Captain: IBB’s Memoir and the Reality of Class
My political consciousness began through my experience of my father: I saw the twilight of his career as a statesman, his many labors, and how much he meant to those he led. But I saw also that, when stacked against the efforts he invested, his returns were abysmal — too many old folks died while waiting for a paltry pension, Bunu LGA never materialized, and the chambers where they once debated politics and policies have become a dust-ridden ghost-infested relic of a distant history.
In the grand scheme of things, he was up against opponents he couldn’t beat: a class of sociopathic vermin who, through sheer thievery of our commonwealth, constituted themselves as marauding plutocrats, ruthlessly impoverishing the masses.
But this is not history. This is a rolling movie — a tragic drama that actively recruits the masses as cast members in their own slow-burning immolation. Stranger than fiction? As mind-bending and grotesque as it gets, this is the lived life of too many who for reasons beyond their reach are not even aware of the nature and extent of their predicament.
No one should be mistaken about the reality of class and the nature of class interests. Class exists and each person should know which class they belong to. The masses are in their own class. Our Machiavellian oppressors and plunderers dressed as political elites constitute their own class. They are aware of their own class. The masses are not. While the masses fight among themselves on which elite is the messiah, the elites rally, collaborate and consolidate their hold. This is how the oppressor becomes the object of admiration — often canonized as a messiah — a mass-level exemplification of the Stockholm syndrome.
When you see this as it is — you will see why a self-styled “evil genius” who by his own admission annulled the country’s purportedly freest national election launched his memoir to the fanfare of an ecstatic public and had every single political and business elite of note in attendance or represented. Let’s conveniently forget that this man — along with his coterie of military generals and civilian collaborators took turn to upset our democracy, rapaciously stole our commonwealth and bequeathed a nation that became the world capital of extreme poverty as their legacy. Let’s forget that under his watch corruption took on a never-seen-before dimension of viciousness and voracity: both in direct cash disappearance and apportionment of assets to cronies. Let’s rather forget all the strings he pulls and why he is courted by every single presidential candidate Nigeria has had since 1999.
None of that matters, of course. Today, he is fêted by the crème de la crème of both classes. The elites will always be there for their own. It is in their class interest to do so. The masses don’t know why they are cheering. No agenda. Just actors dutifully fulfilling their roles.
Had Abacha not died, he too would have been eventually heralded as one of the greatest statesmen this country has ever had. This is no fault of the masses. They are merely involuntary actors in their own slow-burning immolation.
Yet, salvation must come. But from where and when?
