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‘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!

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 …”

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.

Conceding defeat in an election is a
rare thing in our politics, especially when the loser is an incumbent
candidate. It, therefore, came as a pleasant surprise to many observers
when the speaker of the House of Representatives, Dimeji Bankole,
openly acknowledged his failure to get a return ticket to the House as
a reflection of the wishes of his people. Shortly after, Segun Williams
of the Action Congress of Nigeria, was declared the winner of the
Abeokuta South Federal Constituency seat in Ogun State. Mr Bankole
congratulated his opponent and said the ability of the people to elect
the leader of their choice is “a good omen in our national quest to
entrench democracy in our nation.” This prompted one publication to
describe the Speaker’s action as “unprecedented and the unthinkable.”

In more stable democracies, Mr
Bankole’s acceptance of the people’s verdict would not have earned so
much space in the news nor would it have been the subject of an
editorial. But in a country where it is almost impossible for those who
hold power to accept they are no longer popular, the Speaker’s action
has drawn significant attention.

We appreciate Mr Bankole’s courage in a
country where so-called elder statesmen, including one from his state,
have engaged in a battle over who laughs the most at losing opponents.
We praise him for not claiming victory, even though it was a close
race, in a country where candidates who clearly lost elections insist
they won.

Also, we commend the Speaker for not
unnecessarily causing tension in the already volatile Ogun State. We
acknowledge that his peers elsewhere would have acted differently under
the circumstances. Take for instance the governor of Kwara State,
Bukola Saraki, who went on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter
to announce victory for the PDP in three senatorial districts and five
federal constituencies of the state barely five hours after voting was
completed, and while citizen reports were showing an early lead for the
ACN. Of course, Mr Saraki’s arrogance angered many observers. By the
time he realised the folly of claiming victory when no official
announcements had been made and pulled down the posts, the damage had
been done. Protests have since erupted in his state with the opposition
claiming the parliamentary election was rigged.

After hurrying to announce himself
victor, it is hard to think that Mr Saraki would have accepted defeat
like Mr Bankole had he not been declared senator-elect by the electoral
body.

It is characteristic of our
politicians, whether in opposition or ruling parties, to imagine
themselves victorious in elections and force their self-awarded
victories on the rest of us, thereby causing chaos. But there seems to
be a break from this culture as Mr Bankole and others have shown.

Following in the Speaker’s steps, PDP’s
Iyiola Omisore, who chairs the Senate Committee on Appropriation, on
Monday conceded defeat to Babajide Omoworare of the ACN. Almost
plagiarising Mr Bankole’s words, the serving senator said, “The result
of the National Assembly elections should be regarded as the wish of
the electorate which we politicians must respect to safeguard the
nation’s growing democracy. In a true democracy, you don’t expect to be
winning every time.” It is also very interesting that Mr Omisore sees
the conduct of last Saturday’s poll “as a clear signal that our
democracy has come to stay and that our politicians are improving.”

Messrs Bankole and Omisore’s examples should be encouraged by
everyone who wants to see democracy grow in our country. This is not to
say those who have valid arguments that their mandates were stolen
should accept defeat and move on. By all means legal, they should
pursue their cases to logical conclusions. The act of seeking and
getting justice is indeed an integral part of the democratic process.
What we abhor is the culture of ‘do or die’ that plagued our politics
in the past. As Mr Omisore counselled, “Politics is a game of win and
lose. If you win, you take it; if you lost too, you should accept it in
good faith. That is how we can nurture our democracy into full
maturity.”

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