by Kayode Faniyi

When we were younger, we used to draw a line in the sand. It was the way we tried to challenge somebody else to a duel, or a way for a third party to formalize between two contenders an impending fight. The two separate parts so delineated had symbolic and literal meaning. We called them our fathers’ houses and any trespass would signal the onset of hostilities. Coming to think of it now, the line served to incorporate belligerence into a framework of deterrence, and many potential fights were muzzled this way. Of course, there were many an encroachment, and the pursuant fisticuffs.

America watchers will remember a recent event in American policy lore, an event that served to underscore President Obama’s reticent view of the use and usefulness of (direct) intervention. (This reticence is easily understandable when you consider that for some time now, America, for all its firepower, has not distinguished itself militarily. Where it appears it may have, the long view shows that it will not extricate itself from whatever militaristic muddle it has wormed itself into.) As the Syria conflict unfolded, Obama had drawn a line in the sand: use chemical weapons, and the gloves will come off. Many—hawks, particularly—took that to mean that the US would go guns blazing into Syria to depose Assad. The world held its collective breath.

It didn’t happen that way. Assad rubbed clean the line in the sand and overstepped his bounds into America’s father’s house, and a flurry of punches did not ensue. By Obama’s own reckoning however, the American foreign policy establishment was and is too invested in belligerence of the overt sort, the sort that made for awe-inspiring images in the media—I remember marvelling in 2001 at cruise missiles travelling ominously on the Afghan skyline. Assad’s act meant he lost his chemical weapon stockpile, and this, Obama argues, had been the true import of the line. The establishment, its ideologues and legatees around the world wanted a bite, a twist and a yank. All they got was a growl.

A line in the sand. It has always been apparent to me that this would be the defining legacy of a Buhari administration. A line in the sand; a deterrent to further (self-)destructive behaviour. This was the axis around which my support of his candidacy, and my opposition to the Clinton-lite Atiku, turned. It is the axis around which my opposition to the ignorance masquerading as moderate discourse turns.

I have always believed that governments do not deserve praise. Praising governments for good governance seems to me tantamount to praising the sun for turning up every day. I have also always believed in rational engagement with government. Where I differ from most is my insistence that this rational engagement be built upon an adequate understanding of context; that this rational engagement should not proceed sans reason itself. Therefore, as an example, I find it eminently amusing when contemporary Nigerian realities are subordinated to ideas arising from European realities arising from the European Enlightenment (which I’ll admit, is a—deliberate—simplification of the contending discourses in that society.

What I am trying to say is that a rule of law is not a static notion. It is not the rule of law. A society distils its rule of law from its pressing realities. We should be careful in throwing the word “natural” about, because much that answers to natural is actually socially determined, ex post facto. Take a survey of viable post-Western societies, and see how the subversion of that static, abstract, distinctly European notion of a rule of law has enabled their viability. The domineering Western discourse in which we have been subsumed tags this subversion with many different negative markers, but you cannot argue against its efficacy. Not in Sankara’s Burkina Faso. Not evidently in China. Not in Singapore. Not in South Korea.

They are not perfect societies by any stretch of the imagination but neither are Western societies, and thank heavens that the undercurrent of discontent has once again bubbled forth to be internationally prominent. You can imagine the howls of laughter in, say, Beijing, when a United States talking head mouths off about the violation of human rights side by side with images of a Black Lives Matter protest, or some legalistic wrangling over Guantanamo Bay. And don’t get me started on where this so-called rule of law—variously flagrantly flouted and debased by the financial, political and “legal” elite—don’t get me started on where it has gotten us. To erect a structure in a swamp, one must first account for the swamp.

The bogey arrayed against this view has been that the so-called rule of law is to prevent the erosion of individual liberty. To wit, various woolly jurisprudential hoops are allied in the overcoming of the oftentimes unassailable logic of common sense. Where we should walk from Point A to Point B (with all the complexities this simple journey in itself can engender), we are required, rather, to become veritable Simon Biles, all to preserve an implicit unfairness in the orientation of laws. Do you realise the absurdity of seeing Simon Biles twisting, leaping and somersaulting just because she wants to go buy some item down the block?

It could be us, we are told. But hasn’t it always been us? Hasn’t it always been us who have had to bear the brunt of a kleptomanic elite who can conscript the law and barely disguised lobbies to their defence? These are the issues; not the bloody European enlightenment. The earlier we realise within what context we should situate our academic interventions, the better.

Which is why I am particularly thrilled by this government’s broad interpretation of laws in the specific instance of taming corruption. It has often been that the exploitation of legalistic loopholes has been the exclusive preserve of these criminals. Two, it appears, can play that game.

Note that I am not in the business of building totalizing systems or categorical imperatives. I am responding to specific instances of actions taken to project the sovereignty of common sense. In the final analysis, it is not that these instances will culminate in extrajudicial trials, convictions and punishments. For all the kicking down doors in the dead of night, no special tribunals—kangaroo or otherwise—will be set up to try these people. The hysteria is understandable when it comes from politicians, (many) lawyers and their lobbies who sense a demystification, and dastardly operators who work by exploiting the incumbent magnanimity of the system. Anyone outside of these categories need to take a long, hard look at themselves.

A line in the sand. This, again, I repeat, will—I hope—prove to be the legacy of the Buhari democratic years. You hear that, Mr Abati? A line in the sand. The owo ile the doctor prescribes after all orthodox medical knowledge fails. True, it isn’t what we would consider ideal, but then again, isn’t the idea of an ideal course of action contextual? For these times, Buhari joy of populist yearning, I would argue, is just what the doctor ordered. We can work our way up from there (although what group of persons represent the “up” is a question that will not keep me up at night).

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