In the classical stirrings of organised power on the virginal plains of Serengeti, long before Mesopotamia or Persia, long before Hellene or Rome, the first principle of a cohesive union is order. The primordial articulation of the state is peace at any cost.
Yes, peace at any cost for the organized state.
In truth, the state is defined in the necessary peculiarity of a form, an identity, a declarative face of a dictatorship, a semblance of a democratic symbol or some hybrid fusion of the cudgel and representative power.
In the plurality of any version of the organised state, there is the constant feature of coherent balance, the tidiness of a knowing shepherd, and the formative essence of a guide with the summative chart of the illustrations of the state.
Even in the darkness of the most benighted autocracy, there must be a necessary definitive explication of the national journey. There must be a unifying agenda, an observable directedness in the purpose of the state.
The state must be defined in some certitudes, in the firm constancy and in the patterned emblem of power. The state must be seen in orderly comprehension and applicable certainties.
Without order, without a grip of leadership vision, the state dissolves into formlessness, an arbitrary laager of disputations and chaotic madness, a furious animation in a ruinous storm.
Even in the darkness of the primaeval world, the arbiter that is wholly strengthened by the sword maintains his longevity when there is a pacific dispensation in the realm; when there is peace even in the calmness of the grave.
Rules must be obeyed. Orderliness must be perceived even in the virulence of the goon squad’s largeness.
Without order, without discernible arbitration, everyone becomes the law and every individual caprice is legitimised in the murderous malice of the street.
In such a disintegrating recourse, none is anchored in the protective cordon. None is given a fillip from the mounting crucibles. All is fair in the Hobessian universe. The arbiter himself must be consumed in his self-conjured ruin.
It is thus almost unheard of for the state itself to be the trigger of its own ruin and destruction; for the state to be the emblem of inherent terroristic articulations.
No state sponsors terror against itself in some deliberate attempt at self-termination. No! It is self-conflicting.
While it is agreed that suicide is a unitary action of an individual, the collective hurry of a ruling entity towards its own destruction is an inflicted, self-summoned annihilation; the blind, crazed purging of the state by the incumbent power. It is a pogrom of the collectives.
This obliterating recourse is tantamount to incendiary looseness, a frightening invitation to paralysis and the general raging of the bayonet.
Here, everyone is an uncautioned, unhindered master of the realm, defining his presence in the mightiest triumph of the wielded cudgel.
The state eviscerates itself in the suicidal progression of its policies, in the crude orchestration of popular clamour, and in the obtuse sponsorship of misguided ideas that would galvanise the populace against its continuity.
Such now is the disheartening drama of the Nigerian isle when cold, distant, ephemeral cohorts foolishly hurry into destruction by deliberate acts of sabotage and terror, both against themselves and the people.
The Nigerian isle is now flung in darkness without enlightened purpose, without truth, without knowledge, impoverished by the guiding actors, provoked into rebellion by transient arrogant men, who know no God, who are embraced in evil, who are indifferent to the increasing troubles, spurning the widening miseries, scoffing at the flight of mercy and flourishing in intemperate majesty of the wicked and blind to the implacable gathering storm that may consume them all.
Let them frown and scowl, let them wail and storm in godly pride. Let envy be their silenced woe… They doth lie.
Nigeria, welcome to the self provoked Götterdämmerung!
By Prince Uthman Shodipe-Dosunmu
Director-General,
The Patriots Roundtable