African power corridors entertain characters who are anachronistic museum pieces. Most of them who should have been buried in irrelevance are still calling the shots in our firmament. This explains why Africa crawls on the racetracks of development. Mugabe is a symbol of this dinosauria.
These crop of leaders and their milieu were identified by Ayittey, as the Hippo-generation (whom I prefer to call political dinosauria) Ayittey identifies these kind of leaders as gross bandits; vampires who suck the economic vitality and social felicity from their lands; wrecking their lands in service to their greed. Their blueprint is the Swiss bank socialism that many of them crudely learnt from various sources. When politic dons this garb, the opponents of the tyrants in power metamorphose into enemies of the state. All the fundamental freedoms which seemed obvious at face value, becomes a prerogative dispensed at the good and lewd pleasures of the man in power. The basis is then created for the kind of unvarnished evil, consequent on the corruption of absolute power as brilliantly articulated by Lord Acton.
Politics in the hands of such crooked politicians is a quasi-religious art of consolidating the vulgar immunities of privilege at the expense of the commonweal. It then offers an arena for the celebration of nonsense. And the elites are employed at its greatest purveyors. They do this either by active collaboration with the plunderers or by the conspiracy of their silence. This explains why in Nigeria for example, the media would spend priceless time discussing whether Adedibu; a buffoon and a thug, who ruled Ibadan with terror as the shadow government, endorsed his son for the governorship of Oyo state or not, as if the defunct endorsement of a dead thug matters. This explains why the President could arrest and hound anyone who dares criticize the government’s visionlessness. This explains why a governor will spend over 100 million naira of government’s fund to finance the wedding of her daughter. This is the reason why a group of legislator from Enugu state under will take a jamboree to London, where they squandered over 200 million of taxpayer’s money on nothing of significance and value to their constituents.
That our elites are co-opted into the plunder of our commonweal is the game-changer, which has really consolidated our plight. The elite are power epicentres of every community. For Hobbes, “riches, knowledge, and honour are but several sorts of power”. And for David Hume, “nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few”. (First Principles of Government, Essay, 1742). Whenever the few exercise power over the many, excesses are allowed in the bid to sustain this incredible privilege. G.K Chesterton articulated this politicking well. For him, there are no wise few. Every aristocracy that ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob” (Heretics, 1905). For Khrushchev, politicians are the same everywhere. They promise to build bridges where there are no rivers. This is not a great homily for confidence or trust, in spite of the fact popularized by Disraeli that “in politics, nothing is contemptible”. Politicians have presided over the plunder of lands, the desecration of values, the destruction of races, wars, droughts, starvation of whole populations pursuant to senseless economic creeds and ideologies. Politicians have implemented genocidal blueprints, racial profiling and other eugenic methods designed to massacre people, as well as a lot of other senseless policy directions that have made our world worse for it.
Pondering this elitist dissimulation geared towards holding on to power, Karl Kraus asked: “How is the world ruled and how do wars start? He answered: Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read”. Whenever the curtains are pushed back or whenever history is for a moment liberated from the twin pathologies militating against its magisterial vocation; namely the strangulating paws of revisionists and the facility of the human species to collective amnesia, mankind is allowed a peep into layers upon layers of instances, where the pathological greed and unscrupulous scheming of elitist leeches connived with the culpable ignorance and timidity of the masses to blot history’s face with banalities of evil (apologies Hannah Arendt).
This is why every critical appraisal of power shows a crooked history of unforgivable atrocity perpetrated by power under some abiding hypocritical metaphysic, which evolved in time with the singular mission of engendering a mass tolerance, collective ignorance, and historical amnesia to the rotten metaphysic upon which power is constructed and exercised in the course of history. In these instances, the elite instead of rising up to the responsible obligations of power are corrupted by the boundless leeway offered by irresponsibility to wreck havoc on their charges.
The ‘elite’ is the father as well as the child of power. To belong to the elite is to be is some position of power. And to be in some position of power is to belong to the elite. This impious marriage and unholy alliance is the incestuous liaison out of which history's worst structures of sin and oppression were atrociously sired. This adulterous alliance has painted history with abomination of desolations and depraved knaveries, which ended up questioning human claims to sanity and rationality. And when the elite conglomerate to form power bases, they spend their entire existence sustaining the sources and fossilized equations of elitist privilege. They are ready to massacre every discontent, like the Chinese did in Tianamen Square in 89, and silence every dissent like historical tyrannies used infamous policing apparatuses like the Gestapo, Stasi and the CIA to actualize. To this end then, it becomes irrefutable that the principal goal of these amphictyonies masquerading as epicentres of power is to capture, hold and exercise in perpetuity the sources of social legitimacy for the benefit of their narrow interests. These amphictyonies see themselves as above the power of the state. This is why the suspicion could never be retired, that John F. Kennedy was murdered by an American form of this cabal, whose sole goal is power at all costs. And for these amphictyonies to achieve its short and long term goals, all social tools, mediums, agents and agencies are conscripted and commandeered to this end. The major tool of this assault to control social power sources and basis is to hold all the levers of social control. These power centres deploy all contrivances of dissimulation at their disposal to control and manipulate public opinion for their narrow ends. Machiavelli hoisted the firm control and manipulation of public opinion through dissimulation as the major platform of his amoral politicking and Joseph Goebbels made a fine art of it. This notorious metaphysic explains the infamous Operation Mockingbird designed and implemented by the CIA in the 1940s to form, control and manipulate American public opinion moulding it to the direction and caprices of lewd power bases. This operation was a classical example of the ancient attempt of power bases to manipulate and control what the public knows. This inheres in the realisation summarized in the Madisonian aphorism, that “knowledge must forever govern ignorance and that those who wish to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives”. This control of information looms large in the consideration of every power centre as explain by the fact that that the principal job of every politic is to keep the masses of every population imprisoned in ignorance, postural apathy and consolidated unconcern, unable to mount a concerted resistance at the structures created for their oppressive exploitation. As reiterated earlier, the power centres spare no effort or resource in selling their sugar-coated dissimulations as reality, which the masses must subscribe to, or question their sanity. And they purchase the public to suggest or support their own oppression and that of other peoples, cultures, civilizations and nations, to eternally fund the insatiable greed of the holders of power.
Greed for power and privilege oozes from the human primitive will to power. This primitive will to power has clad itself in various deceptive garbs across history. In the ancient times, it spawned well-constructed mythologies, which metamorphosed into religions, to hoist and hide the corrosive and primeval greed in its core. Priestcraft and suffocating theocracies arose to spawn myths and tales to legitimize the primitive pursuit of power, and canonize the usurpers as gods. It subtly manipulated the primeval neurosis and need for father figure resident in the deep bowels of the social unconscious to that end. The priestcraft and the cult of initiates traded on human ignorance and fears, to install clever rogues on the tribunes of power, clutching the levers of authority to dictate social direction, and masquerade their primitive pursuit of wealth, power and women as the earthly rehearsal of divine copulation and will designed to keep earthly existence fertile and stable. They readily cite the divine fornications that were the furniture of the temple mount of the gods at Olympus and other primitive amphitheatres constructed by clever deceptions and sustained by mass ignorance.
This explains why ancient kings and priests were in control of, and enjoyed unlimited access to the choicest real estates, most beautiful harem of wives loaded with intimidating dowries; concubines without portfolio; an inexhaustible chain of royal harlots, and temple prostitutes. The biblical Solomon's management of 300 wives and 700 concubines was not an ancient monstrosity. King Mswati of Swaziland and the serial polygamy of modern royalty and men of power is testament to the fact that this most ancient of proclivities has not expired. Neither is Naboth the only guy who would lose his strategically located piece of choice real estate to the avaricious machinations of a greedy king. Our infantile, neotonic, and nostalgic patronage of the vestiges of these primitive myths, and the survival of this infantile hangovers of our primitive past, sustains aristocratic monstrosities like royalty and constitutional monarchies; and equally ensures that the men of power today, like their counterparts of old, have and maintain their access to the choicest resources, good food, plangent wines, the costliest harlots and mistresses, yachts, stupendous palaces and salaries; and the ever-present envy and/or admiration of those at the immediate proximity and peripheries of power as well as, reverence and worship of the wretched of the earth; the hewers of wood and the drawers of water.
In medieval times and climes kings evolved, tipping the political balance of power to dress themselves in the borrowed robes of divine right, to merge religious sacrality and mundane omnipotence on their persons. This power recalibration fertilized the soil for the germination of feudalism, which consigned the majority of the population to a life of oppressive drudgery, timid subservience and slavish existence in service to the capricious whims of the Alpha male Lords perching precariously on the tribunes of power, their mistresses and robber baronial lords, sanctimoniously hypocritical clergy, and debauched nobles-the feudal establishment whose parochial interests and lewd debaucheries render feudalism imperative. This feudalistic conceptual scheme created divides of privilege and servants of privileges, which underwent various metamorphoses to embraces countries and regions, creating regions of privilege and regions of poverty. The concept of the First, Second and Third Worlds are footnotes to this conceptual scheme. In this scheme, those on the side of privilege are authorized to use and abuse unto extinction and oppressive exploitation, those on the other side, to fund their extravagance and debaucheries. This is the metaphysic underlying globalization and the underdevelopment of the Third World, in spite of the pretentious posturings marshalled to mask the raw exploitative nature of this oppressive relational equation. This explains why Africa and other part of the third world would in history be enslaved, discriminated against, criminally exploited and treated as sub-human beings, with a religious fervour that scuttles the religious pretences of the power centres. Africa’s lot is simply the export and elevation of the exploitative ontologies of the western feudalistic establishment to an extra-national level.
Religion and lately theories of racial superiority were deployed to sustain these superstructures of deceit. Medieval religion was a great champion in the spread of oppressive ignorance, which enslaved the masses and privileged the priests and other power centres. It kept strict guard over the gates of knowledge, which it dispensed like favours to its privileged initiates. Power centres and their religious attack dogs have been forever afraid of knowledge and innovation, because they know that knowledge will always explode the citadels of ignorance, dispel the cloud of unknowing and push back the horizons and frontiers of ignorance, which has been the shackle used in fettering the masses and blinding them to their strengths; thereby neutralizing them from organizing a resistance or questioning their predicament; articulating their discontent, or presenting their rejection of the yoke their existence was condemned to bear by the rogue cleverness of unscrupulous avarice. These guys know that to forever enslave a man; you just need to enslave his mind. This amply explains Galileo's plight, which is nearly a medieval rehearsal of the ancient condemnation of Socrates to Hemlock by the Athenian power centres in concert with the fears and ignorance of the Athenian masses. This explains the medieval church’s index prohibitorum, and medieval inquisition presided over by impious neurotics. This also explains why Hitler was able to rouse ordinary Germans to murder their Jewish neighbours with brutal relish and unemotional economy. This equally explains the contemporary attempt by power centres to manufacture consent, mould and shape public opinion and control the media, with a stranglehold on what the people read and hear. This neurotic desire to control public opinion was the root of monstrosities ranging from the medieval inquisition, the index prohibitorum, and operation mockingbird designed and run by the CIA. No vice is too low for power-centres in the thraldom of politick. Eugenic theories were equally co-opted to eternally confirm the powerless in their places of timid apathy. Racism which was a eugenic ventilation of the human fear of the unknown flowed from the same feudalistic ontology, which delighted in classifying some men as born with blue-blood and majority others with every other colour other than blue. And their function remains the same; namely to create the conditions necessary for the germination and sustenance of their misrule as well as the consolidation of the powerful in their positions and the exclusion to the greatest extent possible of the powerless.
In the modern times, the enlightenment inaugurated by the renaissance and Gutenberg's invention of printing in Mainz, pushed back the veil and cloud of ignorance manacling medieval peasantry by diffusing knowledge across board. The peasants stormed the Bastilles in 1789 France with the banners of liberty, equality and egality- a slogan summarizing their realisation and uncompromised revulsion at feudal manipulation, which ran their lives forever before. They unleashed the turbulent torrents of anger, bottled for centuries in timid fatalism, drummed into them as their justifiable lot by the establishment, whose insular profit designed their predicament. One would have thought that exploitative and narrow insularities of exclusive elitism would be made history at the overthrown of feudalism. That was not to be. This most ancient of organized greed knew that if you can't beat them, you should lead them. That is why it has succeeded in dressing itself in various garbs across the ages to hide its decadent core and maintain itself in being.
In the medieval times, it spawned the legends of blue blood to maintain a perpetual control on power. This sired an army of rascal and royal scoundrels across the courts of Europe. In ancient Rome, it gave rise the Patricians and the senatorial aristocracies, who are major invitees to imperial debaucheries, bacchanal orgies and deadly intrigues of the courts and imperial palaces, while keeping the Plebeians machiavellically busy and occupied with gladiatorial shows, circuses and blood sports, where beasts are unleashed to tear unarmed dissidents to pieces at the bestial cheers of the cowed and impoverished masses. Emperor Flavius knew the importance of occupying the masses with crude entertainment to lull their minds into unconcern and disinterest in relation to the core reasons and sources of their predicament; while the aristocracy divvy up the commonweal amongst their various constituencies sustaining their avarice. Centuries before Hollywood, he built the Flavian amphitheatre in the centre of Rome to host these social distractions, collective hypnosis and mass anesthetization of the poor, to keep power firmly in the clutches of those who have forever had it. That the unregulated machinations of power are forever capable of siring abominations has historical demonstrations to prove it. Monstrosities like Nero and Caligula and the human torches, which graced their palaces were the bestial footnotes of what power in service of narrow insularities is capable of achieving. The same could be seen in Hitler's megalomania; in George Bush's march into Iraq, the Papal commissioning of the crusades, and the Mohammedan conquests of Spain and Jerusalem. In all these only the powerful few profit, while the emasculated and impoverished majority are sacrificed as pawns in these chessboards.
Primeval pretences mutated in order to survive. It coagulated and cryptically institutionalised itself. It did that by engrafting and electroplating its rotten core with a coat of virtues. Where their obscene faces became too gross to hide, they removed their pretences in a pageant of brazen effrontery or audacious impunity; to canonize themselves as quasi-legitimacies that could be aspired to, or a virtue for the elite; but a vicious luxury unaffordable to, and undesirable in the hoi-polloi. This accounts for why a pickpocket, who pilfered a handkerchief is susceptible to be dispatched by an angry mob in an orgy of jungle justice; if he survives being pummelled or barbecued out of existence. While a pen robber armed with only a pen, who stole billions rendering the existence of millions of the poor miserable; is worshipped by the same crowd of his victims. This explains why a murder is deadlier than genocide. A public affairs commentator drove this deadly double standard home, when he sadly observed that if a man kills a man, he is tried for murder and sentenced to the electric chair. If he kills twenty people, he pleads insanity and is sentenced to a psychiatric facility. But if he kills fifty thousand or a million people, he is invited to Geneva for Peace talks; in as much as he still has some power. And the terms of peace are drawn amid leisurely quaffing of plangent wines, heavy cigar smoke, and debauched verbal farts and small talks. Meanwhile, the blood of thousands has already graced the streets, watering a defunct dream for justice. This double standard is institutionalised in social classes and stratifications. In this perspective then, social stratification in its cryptic metaphysic is there to delimit the level and dimension of crime socially allowable for specific groups and classifications of individuals. That means that your scale or level of power predetermines the enjoyments, risks and privileges allowed you. It determines the circles that one can gain admittance into as well as those firmly shut against him. Stratifications are created to nourish and justify discrimination, even in terms of the crimes you are allowed to commit without consequence. Here, the Orwellian dogma that “some animals are more equal than others”, takes a brazen, unadulterated life of its own.
Discrimination is an instrument of power. It is furthered in such a way that it pervades social life from womb to tomb. The masses are encouraged and compelled with omni-dimensional reinforcements, moral blackmail, religious briberies, psycho-social fortifications, fear mongering, threats to life and limbs, subtle policing, brainwashing, propaganda and brutal military muscle to accept as their natural destiny, scaffolds of oppressive exploitation created by power. This is an instrument of control. Anyone who dares storms out of the moat built to house him in, in the social classification pre-designed for him within the rules set by power, is rewarded with an upgrade and admittance into the narrow and elitist club of those who have arrived. He out-dribbled the structures of power using its rules. Those who try that outside the confines of the rules set by power, are blacklisted as rebels; and punished for their audacity. This explains why lords possessed the right of life and death over their serfs, but the serfs reserved no legitimate right to strike back on the royal scoundrels and baronial thieves, who fleeced and enslaved them, their heritage, and posterity unto extinction. Time was when syphilitic, drooling kings arrogated themselves the right to sexual access to the wives, daughters and maids of their courtiers. But the courtier risks placing his head on the executioner's block for daring to dream of fornicating with the queen or princess without express or tacit approval of power and its patronizing paraphernalia. Little wonder why Thomas Jefferson was unrestrictedly raping his slave girl, while any slave man who dared casting a carnal eye on his wife or doubt would have been accused of racial abomination and summarily shot. We must realise that rape here is construe as a power equation, where the consent of the victim was compelled and obtained with a lot of mental, emotional or physical duress.
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