Few Nigerians may have heard of Paul Krugman, the American professor of Economics at the Ivy League Princeton University, columnist with New York Times since 2000 and the 2008 Nobel Economics Laureate. Fewer still may have heard of his 2003 book, The Great Unravelling: From Boom to Bust in Three Scandalous Years.
The book, which I’ve had cause to refer to on these pages, is essentially a collection of his columns about the gross incompetence, fiscal irresponsibility and extreme right wing policies and religiosity of the administration of President George Bush and his Vice, Dick Cheney.
What he has had to say in his introduction to the book bears an uncanny resemblance to what our dear country has experienced in at least the last five years of President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration. A paraphrase of the introductory chapter is therefore in order.
Just before putting his book to bed, Krugman said, he came across a book published in 1957 by no other than Dr Henry Kissinger, “then a brilliant, iconoclastic young Harvard scholar, with his eventual career as a cynical political manipulator and, later, as crony capitalist still far in the future.”
Kissinger’s book, A World Restored, based on his doctoral dissertation, was a study of the failure of Prince Klemens von Metternich, a leading Austrian politician and statesman, and Lord Castlereagh, an Irish and British statesman, in their diplomatic efforts to contain a resurgent France under Napoleon during the 19th century reconstruction of Europe following the battle of Waterloo.
“One wouldn’t think that a book about the diplomatic efforts of Metternich and Castlereagh,” Krugman said, “is relevant to U.S. politics in the twenty-first century. But the first three pages of Kissinger’s book sent chills down my spine, because they seem all too relevant to current events.”
In those first pages Kissinger, Krugman said, described the problems confronting a hitherto stable diplomatic system when it is faced with a “revolutionary power” – a power that does not accept that system’s legitimacy. The revolutionary power Kissinger had in mind was the “France of Robespierre and Napoleon,” said Krugman.
“It seems clear to me,” the Economics Nobel Laureate said, “that one should regard America’s right-wing movement – which now in effect controls the administration, both houses of Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media – as a revolutionary power in Kissinger’s sense. That is a movement which does not accept the legitimacy of the current political system.”
The Bush crowd, he pointed out, does not, for example, believe in merely scaling down the New Deal and Great Society programs that have provided the country’s celebrated social safety net for the poor. Instead it believes in scrapping those programs because, in its eyes, they violated the basic principles of free market.
Again, the Bush crowd did not believe in the multilateralism that had hitherto guided American foreign policy. Rather it believed in the unilateral use of America’s military might to have its way as the world’s only super power, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. “We are a warlike people,” Krugman quoted Michael Ledeen, a prominent American neo-conservative thinker, as saying, “and we love war.”
Little surprise then that, John Bolton, a leading official of the Bush administration told some Israeli officials that after the 2001 Iraqi invasion, they will unilaterally “deal with” Syria, Iran and South Korea.
The Bush crowd did not also seem to believe in the separation of Church and State as a fundamental principle of America’s Constitution. This, Krugman said was exemplified by Tom DeLay, the House majority leader who, for example, told the congregation at the First Baptist Church of Pearland, Texas, on April 12, 2002, that he was in office to promote a “biblical world view” and that his relentless pursuit of President Bill Clinton was motivated by Clinton’s failure to share that view.
Not least of all, the Bush crowd, Krugman said, didn’t even seem to believe that legitimacy should flow through the democratic process, hence its sponsorship of the so-called “bourgeoisie riots” of Miami, Florida, in which violent protesters – they turned out to be a hired crowd – forced a shutdown of a vote recount in the city which would almost certainly have given the 2000 presidential election to the Democrats. Not to take any chances, the Bush crowd even used their control of the Supreme Court to pass an obscenely rushed judgement that disallowed the recount.
By now you may be wondering how all these developments in far away America many years ago have anything to do with events in Nigeria in the last five years, just as many of Krugman’s readers must have wondered how his dredging up of Kissinger’s 1957 book on 19th century European diplomacy was of any relevance to 21st century America.
The answer lies in Kissinger’s remarks in his book that “It is the essence of a revolutionary power that it possesses the courage of its convictions, that it is willing, indeed eager, to push its principles to their ultimate conclusion.” The problem is that most people don’t believe that a revolutionary power would push its convictions to their logical conclusion because of the extreme nature of those convictions. Instead most people believe its rhetoric is merely a negotiating posture until it is too late for anyone to stop the revolutionary power from carrying out its convictions.
It was this public self-delusion that the Bush crowd never meant the extreme right-wing ideology it preached, Krugman said, that allowed it to get away with, among other things, going from Clinton’s budget surpluses to bust in three short years, and taking America into a senseless and indefensible invasion of Iraq that has since made the world much more insecure than it was.
It is my considered opinion that what we have had in this country in the last five years is a revolutionary power akin to the Bush crowd in America. I believe most of members of the cabal which took President Jonathan hostage from his very first day in office, if not the man himself, have never believed in Nigeria. Certainly, they have never believed in playing the game of democracy by its basic rules and principles in so far as these rules and principles stand in their way of capturing and retaining power at the centre.
If you think I am being over the top, consider the fact that this has been the most fiscally irresponsible government in the history of Nigeria given the huge gap between the billions of dollars the country has earned from oil alone and the pervasive poverty in the land.
Consider also the fact that the scale of oil theft in the country has gone industrial since the administration outsourced the securing of our oil pipelines from the Navy and handed it in no-bid contracts to ex-militants – a Chatham House report in September 2013 claimed we lose $3.65 billion a year through such theft – and yet the government refused to revoke the contract. As the former Governor of Ekiti State, Dr Kayode Fayemi said in an interview with Tell, it’s as if the authorities know something about this scale of theft from its primary source of revenue that the rest of us don’t.
Consider again, the fact that the federal government would look askance as supporters of a governor-elect of a state, led by the man himself, invade a court and rough up its officials including the judge, just to stop it from hearing a petition against his election.
Again, consider how a government would brazenly defend money laundering along with illegal purchases of arms abroad using the private jet of a man of God who is a confidant of the president.
Not least of all, consider a government that will keep a deathly silence over the threat by ex-militants to break up this country if the incumbent loses the now postponed presidential election even if his loss was free and fair, and worse, do nothing and say nothing when a respected former army chief calls for their arrest, a call for which the ex-militants rain abuses on the general.
One can go on and on but these alone are sufficient grounds to conclude that we’ve had a revolutionary power on our hands in at least the last five years that truly does not give a damn if this country breaks up.
Re: Between Soludo and Okonjo-Iweala
Sir,
I once had cause to ask a leading Economist and a regular critic of Okonjo-Iweala’s budgeting template if he knew exactly what they do at the World Bank. I asked because if this madam who was a top shot at the place reflects their best with her record in Nigeria, I think the place should be shut down.
Apparently the interventionist role of the bank is why international financing is in perpetual turmoil. The man who brought her dumped her. Another one picked her up. That’s what you get when the man at the top knows only how to pick his nose.
Olu,
+2348033013597.
Sir,
World Bank’s salary/emolument is transparent unlike Madam’s “Consolidated salary.” God dey ooo.
Ladipo O. David,
+2348059096244.
Sir,
Please tell Okonjo-Iweala to shut up and stop boasting about how she left her job at World Bank to serve her country. We all know how lucrative it is being a minister of finance in Nigeria. In fact I would rather be a local government chairman in Nigeria than take her position in World Bank.
Alhaji Abu.
+2348064990886.
