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The 2011 elections
hobbled to a start last Saturday. Compared to the fiasco of the
previous week, it was some improvement. Although the excitement was
dampened, evidenced in the lower turnout, what the process had going
for it was the triumph of human will.

The effusive praise
for the Independent National Electoral Commission in some sections of
the media was premature. For me, the heroes are not Attahiru Jega’s
INEC and the Goodluck Jonathan administration that are eager to
appropriate the modest improvement as monumental achievements. No, the
heroes are the average citizens: the Ibrahims, Adaoras, Chinedus,
Efueyes, and Ladeindes who are ever so accommodating, so large in
spirit to forgive officialdom, and perform their civic duty. They are
the evangelists of hope on which the future depends.

It was they who
turned out early with the never-die-spirit of the Nigerian that can
move mountains when it is deployed to noble acts. They waited patiently
on queues to cast their votes, oblivious of the challenges of the
elements. Neither extreme sunshine nor rain showers could stop those
determined to vote. Their numbers were good enough to lend some
credibility to the exercise. That does not, however, amount to a
success story, considering that it was a second attempt at it.

To be sure, some of
the April 2 hitches still surfaced. INEC officials and electoral
material arrived late at many centres, leading to voting into the night
with all its ominous implications. Party symbols were missing on some
ballot papers; many registered voters could not vote because their
names had disappeared from the register.

Underage voting was
noticeable in some states. Old acts of criminality were also reported.
On the eve of elections, bombs exploded in Suleja, Niger State, and
Maiduguri, Borno State, snuffing out lives of ordinary Nigerians, as
agents of evil sought to abort the process. On Election Day, cases of
murder were reported; heads and limbs were broken, ballot boxes were
snatched and stuffed.

Notwithstanding,
the overall picture conveyed in the media is that of an acceptable
start. Sunday newspapers rightly devoted much space to accounts of our
latest effort at deepening our democracy. The Guardian devoted 23 of
its 80 pages to the elections, NEXT, 9 of its 20 broadsheet pages;
Punch, 18 of 80, and Thisday 24 of 120. In all, that is between 20 and
45 percent.

Some illustrated
their narratives with front page photographs of public figures, from
president to governors, party chiefs to past presidents, electoral
chiefs to political candidates. Others concentrated on the process,
opting to feature the ordinary citizens. Typical of the former were
such papers as The Guardian and Thisday. NEXT and the Punch reflected
the latter practice.

While the Guardian
showed Goodluck Jonathan, the PDP presidential candidate, being
accredited to vote at Otuoke, Bayelsa State; and Muhammadu Buhari, his
challenger from the CPC, casting his vote in Katsina, Thisday settled
for a single shot of the President voting. NEXT and the Punch opted for
crowd shots. In a lavish resolve to capture the electoral excitement,
NEXT devoted half of its broadsheet front page to a crowd shot of
voters at Giginwa ward, in Nassarawa LGA, Kano State.

It did not capture
actual voting; instead it conveyed a horde of people mingling in open
space, perhaps awaiting instruction on what to do. Armed policemen
riding in pick-up vans and others patrolling on foot comingled with
citizens of both genders and across various age groups in a
kaleidoscope of colours. The shot is a time freeze of disorderly
orderliness. Three other shots below captured voters on queues in
Borno, Lagos and Imo States. The Sunday Punch, on the other hand,
front-paged a photograph of Lagosians calmly voting at a ward on
Bourdillon Road, Ikoyi.

And on the new
media, young Nigerians had a field day sharing information on the
elections, such as photographs of voters on queues, sleeping law
enforcement officers, and elections result sheets. They compared notes
on when voting commenced and celebrated the steady release of results.
Overall, the media conveyed a sense of national pride, projecting
images of service and duty, patience and accomplishment, sadness and
joy, anxiety and reassurance.

It is that reassurance that INEC needs to display more ahead of the
presidential elections this Saturday, by correcting the identified
errors, stimulating better turn out, improving voter education about
the voting process and minimising reported cases of voided ballots
because of poor thumb-printing. That reassurance calls for better
partnering with the law enforcement agents to protect the voters and
their votes. The desired result is to translate the qualified success
of last week into a resounding one this Saturday and in the subsequent
elections. That may be a tall dream, this April, but what will life be
without hope? If Mr. Jega can’t give us resounding success, let him at
least strive for elections that are reasonably free and fair. Good luck
Nigeria.

And Laurent Gbagbo
fell. I saw the photos — the strongman stripped of his swagger — and
struggled to reconcile the images of the two Gbagbos.

I remembered Samuel
Doe. Compared to Doe, Gbagbo is a lucky man. He’s alive. He won’t be
pulled apart, limb by limb. I also remembered Saddam Hussein, who, like
Gbagbo, was smoked out of a hole.

Events like these cause me to go all existential (to use that term very loosely), and wonder about power and its meaning(s).

Gbagbo is not the
only one who has had to, in the last few days, come to terms with a
drastic change in personal circumstances. Far away from Abidjan’s Golf
Hotel are Nigeria’s ‘polling units’: scenes, on Saturday, of some
rather dramatic reversals in fate and fortune.

It’s an impressive
roll-call: Iyabo Obasanjo-Bello, Dimeji Bankole, Iyiola Omisore, Kamoru
Adedibu. For a moment, we thought Bukola Saraki and David Mark would
also be on that list. When Saraki (or an aide, perhaps?) tweeted, on
Saturday night, that “all indications show that PDP has won all the
seats it contested in Kwara State…”, I was one of those who
challenged him.

The word before
that moment was that the ACN candidate had defeated Saraki. When,
moments later, the Saraki tweet was deleted, I wondered aloud if it
wasn’t in the first place a case of the governor succumbing to a moment
of delusion. By Sunday morning, it turned out I was the deluded one:
Saraki, unlike his colleague, Gbenga Daniel (senatorial ambition cut
short even before the elections), or ex-colleagues Olagunsoye Oyinlola,
Orji Uzor Kalu and Segun Agagu, had escaped a great fall.

There’s something
about ‘falling’ — as action, and metaphor — that the human imagination
finds fascinating. This might explain why a good number of the
best-known nursery rhymes seem preoccupied with it.

“Jack and Jill went
up the hill / To fetch a pail of water / Jack fell down and broke his
crown / And Jill came tumbling after.”

“Ring-a-ring o’ roses / A pocket full of posies / A-tishoo, A-tishoo / We all fall down.”

In “Jack and the
Beanstalk”, the ogre comes a-falling when Jack takes a cutlass to the
beanstalk. In “Ten Green Bottles”, we witness the tragic, sequential
toppling of all the bottles, until there is none left sitting on the
wall. And in arguably the most famous nursery rhyme of all, Humpty
Dumpty, sitting pretty on the wall, suddenly has “a great fall.” (You
have to wonder if there’s any link between the green bottles and
Humpty’s fall.)

Coming closer to
home, there are the stories from the outsize biography of my childhood
friend, Ijapa, (the most famous tortoise in the world) and his wife,
Yannibo (spelling varies). Ijapa was always falling, whether from
heaven or from tall trees. That explains, we are told, why he has a
broken shell.

Politicians too are
always falling. The Obasanjo years were marked by the most remarkable
‘fallings’ amidst the leadership of the National Assembly — Salisu
Buhari, Evan(s) Enwerem, Chuba Okadigbo, Umar Ghali Naaba, Patricia
Etteh. Some of them are now dead. Others, while still alive, continue
to struggle to regain the lost ‘glory’.

As the latest batch
of fallen politicians come to terms with their new reality (the list is
bound to grow in coming weeks, as the remaining elections take place),
I’d like to raise a series of questions that have always been on my
mind — questions to do with the longevity of political careers in
Nigeria.

How long, on
average, do politicians’ stars shine in Nigeria? Do they, at birth,
come stamped with an expiration date? Do all fallen tortoises get their
backs broken? Who or what decides which Humpty Dumptys, after their
great falls, shatter irredeemably, and which ones the king’s horses and
the king’s men will be able to put together again?

It is a given that
some politicians will recover from their failures. After losing the
1960 presidential elections to Kennedy, (incumbent) US vice president,
Richard Nixon, retired to California to lick his wounds. In 1962, he
made a bid for the governor’s office in California. He lost. He is
quoted as saying, on the night after the election: “You won’t have
Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press
conference.”

It turned out he
was wrong. Six years later, Richard Nixon was president of the United
States, a comeback that would, sadly, end in disgrace in August 1974.

It will be
interesting to see which of the current crop of ‘outgoing’ Nigerian
politicians will sink into oblivion. No doubt, some of the PDP
“chieftains” will remain relevant in the coming dispensation — if their
party wins on Saturday. Ambassador Gbenga Daniel, anyone? Or Dimeji
Bankole, Honourable Minister for ‘Yoot’ Development?

For others, alas,
this is the beginning of the end. “With gratitude to God for four (or
eight) budgets ‘well spent’, we regret to announce the untimely demise
of the political career of …”

‘There is always a
silver lining in every storm cloud,’ summarises my trip from Abuja to
Lagos on Sunday. When it comes to domestic travel, one thing you can
rest assured of is tardiness, or better still, NMT (Naija Man Time).

Nigerian airlines
take things a notch higher when it comes to delaying their passengers,
whether by one hour or 10 hours. I have heard from reliable sources
that some airlines spend several hours waiting for the flight to be
full before takeoff; just like at the motor park, or any major bus stop
in Lagos minus the conductor bellowing the price and destination in a
high pitch. On two occasions, I arrived in the early afternoon and did
not take off till 10pm. The worst thing was not the delay itself but
not being properly informed about what was happening, and the
preferential treatment given to some big men and women.

So, on Sunday, I
arrived at the airport preparing for the worst and, as expected,
Murphy’s Law did set in. The 3:50pm Lagos-Abuja flight was rescheduled
to 6:25pm, due to ‘operational reasons’. The Arik official at the
counter said that text messages had been sent out to all passengers. I
later received the text message around past 4pm. What was the point,
really? With time to kill, I looked around the waiting lounge with the
eyes of a historian, asking myself what had changed. What had remained
the same? Nothing much, was my answer for the former. The place still
looked as dingy as I last remembered it. It had the same shops, and the
dim lighting made the place look almost pre-historic. I guess all the
money had been pumped into the new domestic airport. I silently hoped
that the scene would improve in Abuja; after all, that is where the
money is.

When 6:25pm finally
came, there was an announcement that the flight was going to be delayed
for another 30 minutes. Five minutes later, a uniformed official said
the flight was boarding and we should get on the airport shuttle. I
scrambled on, hoping that this would override the earlier announcement.
Little did I know that I was going to waste another 30 minutes before
the plane actually took off. At the foot of the aircraft, I noticed
that there were two lines and I joined the one closer, only for the man
behind me to ask if I was a man. As I joined the end of the female
line, I saw a man on the queue, so it was my turn to ask if he was a
woman. After it finally got to my turn and I was manually searched, we
had to wait for our luggage to arrive and manually identify them before
they were put on the plane. I wondered to myself: where else in the
world does this happen?

Finally, on board
the very modern aircraft with individual monitors even in economy
class, I crossed my fingers and took my chances. This job as a writer
or journalist, as I am sometimes called, needs to start having some
serious perks and I am not talking about brown envelopes. I told the
air host, a very kind Mr Baba Hausa, that I had my piece in the latest
edition of Wings, the airline’s magazine; and after he confirmed it, I
was treated like royalty: food, drinks and flowing conversations with
the crew members which I will reserve as a story for another day. Three
cheers to the Arik team.

The descent into the capital was the end of my silver lining, as
one of my ear holes got seriously blocked, but I was instructed to hold
my nose and blow gently. It worked albeit over time. Much to my dismay,
the airport in Abuja had not yet changed at all. Still only one
conveyor belt and the place looking so dwarfed and archaic with only
Goodluck/Sambo posters to brighten up the place. Sigh!

Over the past few
months, I have spent an inordinate amount of time counselling people
who believe that their colleagues are attempting to sabotage their
efforts at work. Perplexed by these experiences, I consulted a range of
experts in the human resources field, who explained this growing
phenomenon in corporate Nigeria called the PHD — Pull Him/Her Down.

People who work in
PHD environments live with constant suspicion, distrust and fear. They
often believe that most of their co-workers, superiors and subordinates
are out to undermine them — that everyone is out for their own best
interest and the only way to move ahead in the company is to look out
for themselves at all costs.

This growing
epidemic troubles me deeply. You may choose to blame it on our
country’s history of ‘kleptocracy’ in all sectors of the economy, or
the growing fundamentalist Pentecostal movement, where even a cockroach
might be the enemy and deserves to die. However, regardless of the
source of this growing culture, I am convinced that our economy cannot
possibly thrive if most employees are infected by the PHD spirit.

While trying to
understand and unpack this phenomenon, I have come to appreciate that
it is hinged on the belief that someone can only move up by pulling
others down — the survival of the fittest. It is akin to the jungle
existence, where there are extremely limited resources, and people are
eventually compelled to kill others to ensure that there is enough for
them.

The fundamental
problem with this belief system is that it comes from a position of
lack, and a myopic vision of what the future could possibly hold. The
vantage point that there is a finite pyramid, and that we only have one
option which is to claw our way up and push others down in the process,
is a sad one. An alternative viewpoint would be to imagine that by
working with others, we could enlarge the pyramid, thereby creating
more space at the top, or even join others to create new and better
pyramids. I believe in growing the pie instead of fighting with others
to get a piece of a very small, and sometimes shrinking, pie.

Clearly, creating a
culture with a shared vision and values that do not allow or encourage
the PHD syndrome is tough, especially in our current context; however,
leaders in corporate Nigeria must discourage the PHD syndrome from
taking root in their organisations. Indeed, we have the responsibility
to attempt to change the mindsets of every new employee that walks in
the door, about the possibility of growing a pie so that everyone can
get a bigger piece, instead of fighting for a shrinking pie by pulling
others down.

We should strive to establish an open and transparent culture where
there is no time and no place for backbiting, infighting and office
gossip. We should celebrate team work, accountability and integrity.
This seems like utopia, but it is a culture that is possible to build.
My favourite African proverb states: “If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go with others.” I think it is time we started
going far in Nigeria. It is time to kill the PHD syndrome and decide to
go with others.

Nigeria is one of
the countries that consider the freedom to acquire, carry, and use
offensive weapons inimical to national security as well as the security
of lives and property. The basic argument underlying this arms control
is that granting citizens the freedom to carry arms in an already
volatile environment is to make the state of insecurity in the country
worse.

Contrary views on
the prohibition argue that: the law only caters for the security of
those in power as well as that of the rich and supposedly important
people in society, while making worse the insecurity of ordinary
unarmed Nigerians; the law makes the possession of arms in an insecure
society rather attractive, as citizens would secretly seek to acquire
such arms “in case” the law is unable to protect them; the law
ironically provides a boost to the illegal arms trade across Nigeria’s
porous borders with other African countries, just like it happens when
commodities are banned; and so on.

These arguments
made for and against the possession of offensive weapons are now well
known to many people. The point that should interest us is that many
Nigerians have generally ignored the prohibition and have gone ahead to
acquire and keep arms, sometimes using them openly, believing either
that the law itself is unfair or that their personal protection is
their own business, not that of the agents of the law.

The consequence of
the ignoring of the gun law is that in recent times citizens,
especially the rich and influential, keep a private armoury the same
way they buy and keep pieces of furniture in their houses; hire, arm,
and maintain private armies to guard themselves and their property; and
no doubt have guardrooms where they could detain or make their victims
disappear from the face of the earth. Some professional unions have
also gradually metamorphosed into armed militant gangs that could move
around showing off their weapons and shooting at whim, sometimes
engaging the police in a test of firepower.

The police know
these gangs stock arms but appear reluctant to take decisive measures
to ferret out the weapons and arrest the union members. As expected, if
these gun-toting union members shoot and kill non-members that they
have problems with, they turn the guns on their own members whom they
want out of the way. The union leader, who himself lives by the gun,
may easily fall by the gun, especially because assassinating him is one
quickest way of getting him out of the way so that someone else would
take his position and continue stealing the funds of the union.

Perhaps the
difficulty of the police to deal decisively with these private armies
of some unions in Nigeria is as a result of the fact that such unions
offer contract services to Nigerian politicians and the nouveau riche
in the country. They appear easy and cheap to hire for contract
killings, as well as the dirty business of causing mayhem and
terrorizing the population during elections. How would a state governor
who has been using such private armies suddenly turn and fight them? It
would take a special tactician in government to demobilize or crush an
army that has helped him in capturing power.

Under the excuse of
keeping vigilante groups, some states and communities in Nigeria
acquire and put dangerous weapons — pump action, AK47, revolvers, etc —
in the hands of retired and serving criminals who, once in a while,
snuff out the lives of innocent citizens. Of course, such vigilante
groups, in living up to “expectation”, make sure they protect the
interest of the big men that have created the local “army.” Vigilante
groups also sometimes have the secret mandate of watching oga’s
political opponents, making sure their vigilance means that such
targets are crippled, if they cannot be made to disappear. Who knows,
sometimes vigilante could try out a war game on a helpless bank, at
least to help the money in the vault regain its freedom. And, once in a
while, vigilante eats the bone hung on its neck, kidnapping some
relatives of the ogas, to find out whether some handsome naira could
make the panic journey from the mansion vault to the inner recesses of
the African jungle.

No one teaches the
wild dog when and how to reverse its roles when it thinks that enough
crumbs are not falling from oga’s table. And like any mafia
arrangement, any oga that whacks people should expect to be whacked
someday, sometimes by the very hit men in his employ.

Now the elections are here again and one could see the private
armies servicing the weapons and getting them ready for action. One
could hear the crackle and rattle of the guns of “murderland” as they
clear their throats to speak death to targets in the political
struggle. Let us hope your innocence, as a Nigerian, is more innocent
than mine.

Some will remember that Omega Bank
advert with the caption ‘Things are looking up’, some years back.
Tentatively, and cautiously too, we can adapt that line for our dear
country, Nigeria, based on last Saturday’s National Assembly elections.
For a set of people that are overtly cynical of their government, and
justifiably so many times, one may be tempted not to see the new ground
the Independent National Electoral Commission has covered. Elections
have always been contentious in Nigeria right from the first set
conducted in 1959 when the country wanted to set up an independent
government preparatory to Independence, down to the 2007 elections.

It has always been filled with ballot
box-snatching, spiced with thumb printing in huts and sheds, away from
the real voters and the voting centres. In 1999, my colleagues and I,
in the course of duty as journalists, visited some places in Delta
State, and we saw people who queued patiently waiting for polling
officials and materials that never arrived. At the state capital,
Asaba, later in the night, I was stupefied to see results from those
areas. This scenario was replicated in many areas of the country. A
taxi driver once told me of how in 2007, he was among those who chased
away all the party agents at a ward in Mushin, Lagos State before
“capturing” the ballot boxes and “voting” for the party who hired them,
having bribed security agents.

But, by and large, Attahiru Jega and
INEC, under his watch, have performed better than we saw in previous
elections. Many have always referred to the June 12, 1993 elections as
the freest in our nation’s history; however, last Saturday’s elections
went well too in most places. Though the jury is still out as there was
violence, bomb explosions, and isolated unpleasant incidents across the
land, the political science professor and his staff did not do badly
especially when viewed against the fact that a logistics logjam
threatened the elections initially fixed for April 2. Clearly, things
are surely looking up.

And for those who are fond of using the
United States of America as a yardstick in these matters — conveniently
forgetting the number of years it had taken the country to get to where
she is on the democratic journey — the words of Johnnie Carson, the
assistant secretary of state on African affairs in Abuja to journalists
last Sunday, are instructive. “It is good to acknowledge the good work
of Jega and Nigerian Youth Service Corps members. People went to the
polls, they were accredited, and they voted without any hindrance. I
saw no malfeasance in any of the polling stations we visited,” said Mr.
Carson.

It might not be the tectonic shift some
Nigerians wanted in our march towards a credible democratic experience,
but it is a mighty drop in our national ocean. Just a week ago, all
eyes were on Jega as he ate that tasteless pastry that is most
unpopular with our leaders in this part of the world, humble pie, and
addressed an angry nation that elections had been postponed. Now, his
beatification process has commenced.

By the way, we ought to give credit to
Goodluck Jonathan too. He has received a lot of flak, some rightly so,
for blatantly refusing to take decisive steps needed to get Nigeria
moving in the right direction. He will, however, not be forgotten for
appointing Jega. Findings from INEC and the presidency reveal that
truly, he has given a free hand to the electoral commission to operate.
Gone was the regular executive overbearing attitude particularly
designed to give the ruling party undue advantage. We can hold him by
his words that nobody should rig for him, as he has demonstrated this
so far.

It’s the hallmark of statesmen and stateswomen that countries are
usually put above self, and we can only hope that the man from Otuoke
will demonstrate this attitude come Saturday. Resisting the pressure of
party hawks to tinker with INEC to give a helping hand (read rigging)
should be throughout the entire gamut of elections. Nigeria will be
better for it and we’re all going to be winners. Jonathan will go down
in history as a true statesman, bad performers will be voted out, and
victors will know that non-performance will earn a red card in four
years’ time while more decent people will have no qualms about entering
public service.

Despite a rather
shaky start, the April national elections have kicked off and
indications so far suggest that they will be fairer and more credible
than Nigerians expected. It is true that we have only just voted in the
first of three major polls, but the account of the voting in these
elections has been fairly positive so far.
The turnout was
encouraging, though not as high as it could have been. For instance, in
Kano, a place with seven million registered voters, only two million
came out to vote. Clearly, there is room for improvement but it is a
good start, and it is likely that more voters will turn out for the
most important poll — the presidential.
Across the country,
voters seem satisfied with the conduct of the election.

When I asked a
friend in Kano — a loyal supporter of one of the parties expected to do
well in the state but which performed woefully — for his assessment, he
said: “We lost fair and square”. He didn’t make any reference to
rigging and admitted that his party’s loss was more to do with its
inability to connect with voters.
Although there were
reports of intimidation, violence, voters who couldn’t find their names
on the register, underage voting and even attempted rigging, it seems
these incidents were not widespread.

The Independent National Electoral
Commission has announced that it will be holding rerun elections in
some wards across three councils in the Anambra Central senatorial
district. Undoubtedly, over the next few days, we will see more
election cancellations in a few other places.
Results are already
being challenged in certain areas, with candidates and parties sending
petitions to the electoral umpire. Some of these cases will certainly
end up in front of election tribunals and the courts but indications
are they will be in the minority. The general consensus is that by and
large, the votes of those who went to the polls counted. The European
Observer Mission said of the polls, “We observed an overall encouraging
conduct of the elections in a generally peaceful atmosphere. Our
observers reported that the majority of visited polling units were
operational, and that accreditation and voting were mainly conducted in
a timely manner. However, problems such as inaccurate voter’s registers
and inconsistent implementation of electoral procedures were observed
and need to be addressed before the next elections.”
The architect of
this relatively free and fair poll is President Goodluck Jonathan.

Time
and time again, he has reiterated his commitment to ensuring that
people’s votes count. Many, including me, were sceptical of the
president’s utterances. It’s not surprising really because Nigerians
have become wary of listening to politicians make promises they never
fulfil. But as the English like to say, the taste of the pudding is in
the eating. So it has come to pass that the incumbent government does
not appear to have launched a rigging machine as was seen in the 2007
elections.
In order to fulfil
his promise, President Jonathan relied on Attahiru Jega to deliver
credible polls.

This, to an extent, the man has done. Last week, some
Nigerians were calling for his head; today, they are singing his
praises to the high heavens. However, the job is just starting. The
bigger test will be with the presidential polls where the stakes are
higher. Mr. Jega must use the days he has left to ensure that his
logistics arrangements are effective. That he minimises the late start
in the polls as experienced in some places last Saturday. That voter
register anomalies are corrected and also as important, make it clear
that he will have no hesitation nullifying polls which fall short of
acceptable standards.

True, our standards are low to begin with but if the presidential
and gubernatorial polls are conducted in an atmosphere of peace devoid
of massive rigging, and the majority of those who come out to vote are
able to do so, many Nigerians, even those whose candidates lose would,
I am certain, be satisfied. These polls can be the foundation upon
which we build a more credible electoral system and the winner in all
this will be Nigeria.

In all my 50 years,
I have never held a passport. Other than visiting Lebanon, I’d never
left Syria when, in fall 2004, I was barred from leaving the country. I
tried many times afterward to get a passport, but to no avail.

I spent 16 years of
my youth in my country’s prisons, incarcerated for being a member of a
communist pro-democracy group. During the recent protests, many more
friends have been detained – most of them young — under the
government’s catch-all emergency laws.

The state of
emergency, under which Syria has lived for 48 years, has extended the
ruling elite’s authority into all spheres of Syrians’ public and
private lives, and there is nothing to stop the regime from using this
power to abuse the Syrian population. Today, promises follow one after
the other that these all-pervasive restrictions will be lifted. But one
must ask, will it be possible for the Baath Party to rule Syria without
the state of emergency that has for so long sustained it?

The official
pretext for the emergency laws is the country’s state of war with
Israel. However, restricting Syrians’ freedoms did no good in the 1967
war, which ended with the occupation of the Golan Heights, nor did it
help in any other confrontations with the Jewish state, nor in any true
emergencies. Because in the government’s eyes everything has been an
emergency for the last half-century, nothing is an emergency.

Syria’s struggle
against an aggressive Israel has encouraged the militarization of
political life – a development that has been particularly favourable to
single-party rule. And the suspension of the rule of law has created an
environment conducive to the growth of a new ruling elite.

In 2005, the Baath
Party decided, without any serious public discussion, to move toward
what was dubbed a “social market economy.” It was supposed to combine
competition and private initiative with a good measure of traditional
socialism. In reality, as the state retreated, new monopolies arose and
the quality of goods and services declined. Because local courts are
corrupt and lack independence, grievances could not be fairly heard.
Add to that a venal and idle bureaucracy, and the supposed economic
reforms became a justification for the appropriation of economic power
for the benefit of the rich and powerful.

Economic
liberalization was in no way linked to political liberalization. After
a half-century of “socialist” rule, a new aristocratic class has risen
in Syria that does not accept the principles of equality,
accountability or the rule of law. It was no accident that protesters
in the cities of Daraa and Latakia went after the property of this
feared and hated aristocracy, most notably that of President Bashar
Assad’s cousin Rami Makhlouf, a businessman who controls the country’s
cellphone network and, more than anyone else, represents the
intertwining of power and wealth in Syria. Today’s ruling class has
undeservedly accumulated alarming material and political power. Its
members are fundamentally disengaged from the everyday realities of the
majority of Syrians and no longer hear their muffled voices. In recent
years, a culture of contempt for the public has developed among them.

Although some argue
that the demonstrations are religiously motivated, there is no
indication that Islamists have played a major role in the recent
protests, though many began in mosques. Believers praying in mosques
are the only “gatherings” the government cannot disperse, and religious
texts are the only “opinions” the government cannot suppress. Rather
than Islamist slogans, the most prominent chant raised in the Rifai
Mosque in Damascus on April 1 was “One, one, one, the Syrian people are
one!” Syrians want freedom, and they are fully aware that it cannot be
sown in the soil of fear, which Montesquieu deemed the fount of all
tyranny. We know this better than anyone else.

A search for
equality, justice, dignity and freedom — not religion — is what compels
Syrians to engage in protests today. It has spurred many of them to
overcome their fear of the government and is putting the regime on the
defensive.

The Syrian regime
enjoys broader support than did Hosni Mubarak in Egypt or Zine El
Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia. This is a source of strength, and one that
Assad appears not to consider when he relies on the security forces to
quell protests. If the regime is to keep any of its deeply damaged
legitimacy, it will have to answer the protesters’ demands and
recognize the popular longing for freedom and equality.

Whatever the
outcome of the protests, Syria has a difficult road ahead. Between the
pains of oppression and the hardships of liberation, I of course prefer
the latter. Personally, I want to live nowhere but in Syria, although I
am looking forward to acquiring a passport to visit my brothers in
Europe, whom I have not seen for 10 years. I also want, finally, to
feel safe.

Yassin al-Haj Saleh is a writer and political activist. This essay was translated from the Arabic.

New York Times