Easter and third force
Sam Omatseye
It’s time to retire death – on the third day. It is also a time for the illusion of life for number three. A political party that came third is craving a fantasy of Easter. Like Christ, it wants to resurrect heaven-bound, as the icon of Nigerian salvation. Moreso as it affects piety as powerhouse.
From pulpits to populists, it has clutched at straws to make itself saviour. To such breed, Jesus himself proclaimed, “I never knew you.” Speaking to such starry-eyed adventurers, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer asserts, “We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must.” We can see this brutal hysteria in their flirtation with violence by calling for subversion, by rejecting a process they took part in, by hugging interim government, by teasing the army. Its tactic? A tyranny of trolls. Soyinka calls them fascists and everywhere they plead guilty, online, on TV, on radio, on the streets.
They have also called themselves the third force, a badge that sits on their chests with historical inelegancy. Third forces have tended through history to fascinate but only as lovable losers. The only time they made headway was in France in its tempestuous Fourth Republic, and that was because its great avatar of the 20th century, the aloof, charismatic war hero Charles de Gaulle pulled an egoistic stunt by announcing his resignation. He thought his fellow citizens would mass, drooly-mouthed, and grovel to his rural home and beg him to return. No dice. He misread a proud people, inflating himself as indispensable in a republic of squalls and quarrels. Since then, the French have wobbled at a third force revival, including Francois Mitterrand. Third force is odd force.
Nor is the LP the first crack at the third force in Nigeria. If, it can be so called. Well, we might. First, because its candidate turned a moment of party turncoat into a momentum. Two, it came third at the polls. We pretended in the First Republic. But NEPU, Nigerian Middle Belt Congress and others had no national emblem. AG was strong, but no farther than the western region, and parts of Midwest. NEPU was northern maverick as Tarka’s party flailed with minorities. NCNC that started as a great nationalist umbrella shrank into an eastern rump under Zik. The Second Republic was no better. With NPP, GNPP and UPN as counterforce to the towering NPN, we had no other presence. Only puny upstarts like Braithwaite’s NAP that never woke up.
We might have thought that the rise of NADECO, the fortitude of PRONACO, and quite a few other such events would open the way for such an idealist dawn in the country. We never had. Enahoro, Soyinka and others have been proponents. In his The Man Died, the memoirist relates his effort to forestall the civil war by daring across the Biafran border, and wrote about the value of a third force to salvage a drift down an incline of blood and death. For this essayist, what we have had as the third force was the jackboot. The army was a primitive awakening in our history, and they always came with messianic guile. First, we hailed them, then we bewailed them. By the advent of June 12, they had reached the end of their tether. Many depredations after, Nigerians have forsworn them. They were a de facto third force that even their masters spat out and changed gear to civilian democracy even if they look like sinners in cassocks.
It is therefore a paradox that those who call themselves the third force should now be calling on that superstition to save us. When Soyinka said he wanted to debate Datti Ahmed, this essayist squirmed. How could the bard spar with a man not worth his intellectual spare part. In his War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy said: “It is better to bow too low than not low enough.” That was a call to humility. But Soyinka is above such stooping. Not a mental fit. I am happy it will not happen. This is a season where some of the so-called third force have spun a tribe of spurious intelligentsia. Some who had a level head had leveled their heads with bigotry of tribe and faith, and forgot their former selves of even temper and subtlety. They have become barbarians of thought. There is no chasm between them and the republic of trolls.
We saw one of them the other, the writer Chimamanda Adichie, go desperate. She wrote a piece in the New York Times that I skewered. Then she changed platform to The Atlantic. She wrote with innuendoes and half-facts and outright lies. She tried to con the America president and public by posing as a detached observer. She might have added that she campaigned for the LP guy, that they have had dinners together, appeared in public together, and they bonded in a funeral hour when the man attended her parent’s burial ceremony. She cited polls as evidence that LP won. She did not even acknowledge PDP in the polls. Here is a person who touts the iniquity of a single story. Yet, she sweetened to one. Her writings drip with evidence of a single story. In her Half of a Yellow Sun, she describes the Yoruba as lickspittle, the Fulani fellow is a sexual weakling who must yield way for the biceps of Odenigbo, the Yoruba academic at Nsukka is skittish and obnoxious and the Biafran minorities are turncoats. Even in her Americanah, Soyinka – not named – gets a jibe when a Yoruba fellow is put down as in love with only writers people cannot understand.
Not once in her letter to Biden does she cite any statistic. Anecdotes don’t make patterns. She may write fiction, but the 2023 poll is reality. As I noted last week, we had over 176,000 polling units in the country. But some are mistaking their backyards for all of Nigeria. The noise is mainly in the southeast and Lagos, and the rest of the country watches the theatre of the disgruntled. Even the Endsars crowd is a backrow crow of the choir and their throats choke often in the pietistic and tribal threnody. The Endsars youth wanted LP for one reason, the LP embraced them for another. One used the other. The young idealists did not know the bus and driver until they had left the station.
She refers to technology as though that same technology is not the solution. What we have is what the American novelist Don DeLillo describes in his work, White Noise. We are in an era of erratic decibels pieced together by an odd rhythm of blind rage. As DeLillo says, even technology does not help such persons. Hear him: “The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.”
Hence some of them do not know how to make technology work but to turn it into a Frankenstein monster.
So, if we wanted a third force, this is not the sort. The United Kingdom has sought its own as well and fallen short, especially with the party known as Lib Dem, or Liberal Democratic Party. From the Whigs and Tories duel centuries ago to the birth of the Conservatives, the country searched. When a coalition gave birth to the Labour Party that sent war hero Churchill squealing out of Downing Street, it was no third Force but, like APC, a coalition of opposition as counterforce to the Conservatives. The Liberal Party is the ancestor of the Lib Dem today but a different ideological makeup.
The idea of a third force – not so called – began in the US, with Theodore Roosevelt with his Bull Moose Party when he broke away from the Republican Party. He split the Republican Party vote with Taft and handed the victory in 1912 to Woodrow Wilson. America was to witness this later with the rise of Ross Perot, who gobbled up many George H. Bush votes and Clinton emerged winner. It repeated itself in Ralph Nader and his Green Party that rid Gore of his victory against the son Bush. This was what happened with APC victory with LP devouring PDP takings in southsouth , southeast , it’s echo chamber in Lagos and parts of north central. It is the way of democracy. This scenario restrained Donald Trump from running as independent. Rather he rammed his way into the party leadership, appearing both as maverick and mainstay. He would have lost if he didn’t. Bernie Sanders did same, and challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic ticket. We saw same pattern in the Philippines, Turkey, Hungary, et al.
In Nigeria, tribe and faith will not open the way for a third force today. The big parties know this. Even the LP knew this, hence it latched on to tribe and faith with the odd coupling with young persons from the south who rode a wrong wave. The rhetoric of youth often assumes southern youth and northern youth are one. In the Endsars imbroglio, what the young wanted in the south conflicted with the north. The southern raconteurs insult northern youths by appropriating their story.
While Jesus rose the third day, this third force is not rising again. It has committed suicide and embalmed itself after an act of political self-crucifixion.
Credit: The Nation
